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A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALUE 



BY 
DAVID WIGHT PRALL 



Univeesity of California Publications in Philosophy 
Vol3, No. 2 



UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS 
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 



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A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALUE 



BY 

DAVID WIGHT PRALL 



University of California Publications in Philosophy 
Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 179-290 
Issued September 3, 1921 



ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction 179 

Statement of Thesis and Outline op Contents 179' 

The acknowledgment of interest in living amounts to the 
imputing of value to life — Thus valuing is the basis of all value — 
This affirms not that every value is universally valid, but that 
any value can be dealt with on the same sort of ground as any 
other value — The thesis is thus formulated against a compart- 
mental attitude towards human activities — The contention is 
that recognition in judgment of "lower" values implies the 
reality of "higher" values; that values as such have a clearly 
definable status in reality; and that criticism of values always 
consists in an identical process, whether applied to one sort of 
value or to another — The chapters of the essay outlined. 

Chapter I 182 

The Question as Eaised in Personal Experience 182 

The difficulty of finding standards for judging literature — 
Antecedents bear on the question but fail to solve the problem 
■ — -It is the old question of mechanical explanation of qualities 
— Illustrations of valuing in ethics on the basis of UJicritieally 
assumed authority and of the inadequacy of ' ' antecedents ' ' 
to explain such valuings — The questions of value-theory raised 
by such valuings — Formulation once more of the situation illus- 
trated and of the questions involved. 

Chapter II 196 

Preliminary Account op the Experience op Valuing and the 
Logic of Value Judgments 196 

Necessity for a clear view of the empirical experience 
under discussion — This is to be sought in the first person as its 
only possible locus — The two tasks of the present chapter are: 

(1) to describe consciousness of value, ethical and esthetic; 

(2) to give an account of the logic of this situation — Value- 
judgment not merely instrumental — The valuing experience and 
its implication of the good life illustrated in the case of a 
useful article — An example of ethical value, illustrating the 
sense in which ethical values are not means but ends — An 
example of esthetic value, illustrating the sense in which it is 
true that all values as ends are esthetic — This merely another 
aspect of the traditional description of the esthetic experience 
as ' ' intrinsic ' ' — The generalizing of these individual exper- 
iences, while it does rest on the assumption that other minds 
resemble one 's own, is thus assuming only what is necessary 
to rational discourse — So far the experience of valuing has 
been described psychologically — For the logical form of the 
value-judgment we may use Kant 's phrasing in the Critique of 
Judgment — The difficulty for our investigation is not the form 
but the import of judgments such as This is right, This is beau- 
tiful — This logical difficulty is that of all judgments, however 
— But to assert it as invalidating all judgments is meaning- 
less — Our real difficulty is not so much logical in any technical 
sense as it is empirical; we are to seek a fuller account of the 
meaning of right and beautiful in such situations as were 
described in the earlier part of the chapter. 



PAGE 

Chapter III 206 

An Account of Value as Interest in Terms of Psychology 206 

The question at this point seems to be: What is value? — 
Psychologists answer that it is based on interest: I value what 
suits me — That this is merely a psychological result is not 
significant criticism — According to Shand and Stout valuing 
anything = having an interest or sentiment directed towards 
that thing — This is an intelligible account of the valuing ex- 
perience — In spite of some difficulties and confusions Eibot 
substantiates this view — The psychological school of value- 
theorists, Ehrenfels, Meinong, and others, seems more inter- 
ested in the denotation than in the connotation of value — Since 
we are looking for the distinguishing characteristics of the 
experience rather than the variety of instances in which it 
occurs, or the laws of its occurrence, we get little aid from this 
school — We have so far merely taken up the psychological 
result suggested: that value is interest — This, however, sug- 
gests a hedonistic doctrine, and it is a question whether such 
a defense even as Professor Perry 's is adequate support for 
the position — Our interest at least demands a different sort of 
development of the subject, for we are asking the meaning of 
the value-judgment. 

Chapter IV 215 

The Pragmatic Theory of Valuation as Expounded by Dewey .... 215 
The definition of value in terms of interest suggests a 
question as to the function of judgment in determining value 
— An illustration to show that according to our proposed 
definition judgment merely records value — Dewey's recognition 
of the distinction between motor-affective attitude and cogni- 
tive judgment — Interdependence of judgments and attitudes 
does not identify them with each other — While Dewey does 
admit value in the sense defined in this essay, the statement of 
his investigation indicates that for him this sense of the word 
is unimportant and that the significant object of study is a 
process which he calls valuation — But Dewey admits two senses 
of the word: to value is to esteem or to estimate, to prize or 
to appraise — Value in the first sense is a datum, in the second 
the result of a logical process — Dewey thus regards our defini- 
tion, which considers value in the first sense, as irrelevant — • 
Dewey's judgment of practice defined and illustrated — Value 
thus ' ' something to be given by future action ' ' — An illustra- 
tion of this process of valuation — The judgment here fills out 
the process itself — Truth of the judgment and validity of the 
value thus dependent upon outcome in later action — This 
account seems to contain confusions of thought — It fails to 
distinguish between a logical process and a succeeding set of 
motor activities — ^^It makes present truth depend upon a future 
outcome — It appears that value is not instituted by judgment, 
but is present before the judgment is made — Summary of the 
view presented and of the criticism offered. 

Chapter V 227 

The Idealistic Criticism 227 

So far it has been maintained that having value is based 
upon being in relation to a motor-affective attitude — The ideal- 
istic criticism of such a thesis (1) is in error in its definition 



of value, but (2) points to an important phase of value theory 
not so far treated in this essay — The difficulty in refuting any 
idealistic theory lies in the idealist's insistence on his own 
epistemology as the prior question — But this prior question 
really involves the assumptions to which he objects — The 
present chapter will attempt the analysis of one example of 
the idealistic criticism — Bosanquet chosen as representative — 
One characteristic of idealistic theories seems to be the insist- 
ence on the logical nature of value — A second characteristic is 
that value is in a special sense held to be objective — Idealism 
appears to make value non-subjective, but somehow of the 
nature of thought; and it does so on the basis of what is 
apparently a failure to distinguish motor-affective attitude 
from cognitive judgment — Our criticism would be that idealism 
is thus wrong on two points, viz., (1) the objectivity of value 
and (2) the logical nature of value; but idealism points also to 
a lack in our theory which a later chapter is to supply — To use 
Bosanquet as illustrating these errors and this suggestion we 
must note his general position — Summary of his conception of 
mind in nature — Quotations to show Bosanquet 's essentially 
idealistic position — This position defines value much as it does 
reality, and thus neglects the real issue as to what sort of 
reality value has or is — Bosanquet 's argument to be taken up 
in detail — The sort of experimental data he employs — His treat- 
ment of the question seems not to distinguish value from the 
rest of real experience — He meets the issue by attempting to 
substitute a more adequate concept for that of satiety or end 
as applied to a finite conscious process — His actual formula- 
tion of the problem in a question, Can values be argued on? — 
Difficulty in his use of the word ultimate — "We can agree with 
his first assertion, viz., that values can be argued on, but we 
disagree that this admits their logical nature — We can also 
agree with his refutation of one interpretation of the negative 
answer to his question — His second interpretation of the nega- 
tive answer, however, is our own contention, and we can not 
agree with his refutation of this answer — This refutation 
makes two points: (1) that the distinction between motor- 
affective attitude and cognitive judgment is negligible and 
(2) that value depends upon the inherence in the object of the 
character of ' ' logical stability of the whole ' ' — The first point 
has already been met; the second we must now meet — Sum- 
mary of the argument up to this point — In admitting that the 
experience of caring for something is necessary to arguing 
upon the question of the nature of value Bosanquet appears 
to admit that interest or motor-affective attitude is closely 
related to value itself and not at the opposite pole as he has 
affirmed — Furthermore it can be shown that the "logical char- 
acter of the whole ' ' merely names a relation which is consti- 
tuted by a motor-affective attitude — This shown by his phras- 
ing — Furthermore, analysis of Bosanquet 's statements in detail 
indicate either that the experience of the logical character of 
the whole inherent in the object is another name for motor- 
affective attitude or else that experiencing the logical char- 
acter of the whole is not a humanly possible experience — Since 
valuing is a human experience, the second alternative appears 
impossible — Bosanquet 's conclusion quoted — Summary of the 
position we have taken in opposition — Our position clearer 
and more consistent — The next chapter to sketch a theory of 
value based on this position as to the nature of value. 



PAGE 

Chapter VI 248 

The Status and the Kinds of Value as Implied in Judgments of 
Value „ 248 

The present chapter to show how all judgments of value 
imply the reality of esthetic and ethical value and to exhibit 
the status of value — Value as defined in this essay implies 
relation to a subject — Some further questions that have not so 
far been considered — A concrete case of value in the light 
of our definition — Meanings of the objection that value is 
objective — These objections answered — Judgments of value, 
however, are not motor-affective but logical and have logical 
implications — On the basis of our definition two points to be 
made — The first of these is the identical nature of value, as 
illustrated in examples of various sorts of value — To admit 
this does not blur useful distinctions; it simply makes the 
concept available to describe any value situation — The second 
point is to show that judgments of value in any field imply 
the reality of ' ' higher ' ' values — The identical nature of value 
tacitly admitted in many of our conventional arrangements — 
To see that our definition always applies, it is important to 
notice that while the sort of reality of the object valued may 
vary the value itself always consists in the same sort of rela- 
tion to a subject — Thus the intangibleness of the object does 
not affect the nature of its value — The importance of this 
conception to be illustrated in the next chapter — Some mis- 
conceptions stated and the objections thus arising answered — ■ 
To assert that valuing is not a logical activity does not deny 
the validity of logical thinking, nor the stability of the uni- 
verse — To say that judgments of value merely record valuings 
does not deny that future valuings depend upon previous 
judgments — Value judgments themselves vary in value as well 
as in validity — We have thus considered the meaning of real 
value — Meaning of the term absolute as applied to value — A 
suggestion that with proper arrangements money might be a 
satisfactory criterion of value — The second point in the chapter 
is to show the implication of the reality of ' ' higher ' ' values 
in all value-judgments — An example of a value-judgment and 
its implications of further values: the judgment that this pencil 
is valuable implies the intrinsic value of truth — Sense in which 
truth is intrinsically valuable — Sense in which the judgment 
that tnith is valuable may imply the reality of the value of 
right action — Sense in which the right is intrinsically valu- 
able — Sense in which the judgment that this is right implies 
the reality of esthetic value — Justification of use of terms intrinsic 
and extrinsic as applied to value — Objection to the term absolute 
as applied to value — None of these considerations denies our 
purely relational definition of value — This fact shown by illus- 
trative analysis of a particular motor-affective attitude: the 
valuing may be explained in terms of its component parts or 
in terms of its end — In either ease the value is created by 
valuing — Eeligious values are created by the valuing of the 
valuing activity itself — Social is a confusing lerm as applied 
to value — Summary of the results of the thesis: it has defended 
a relational theory of value, but it has not denied the reality 
of truth or right or beauty. 



PAGE 

Chapter VII 270 

An Application to the Theory op Literary Criticism 270 

A theory of value should throw some light on the theory of 
literary criticism — Criticism is a valuing activity and thus 
adds value to the world — How our theory would apply to the 
judicial-impressionistic controversy — The present chapter to 
treat a few arbitrarily chosen points — The reality of literary 
value — Esthetic values are not always indicated by price, but 
criticism is nevertheless an attempt to measure esthetic value — 
Value of a poem an example of intrinsic value as defined above 
— All intrinsic value really esthetic — The value of literature 
is thus esthetic value, and literary criticism is necessarily 
esthetic criticism — The abuse of the term pure literature : value 
lying in the relation to a subject which is a complex person, not 
a special faculty, it follows that purely literary value is com- 
monly a false abstraction, involving a form of the substance 
fallacy — The impressionist-judicial controversy — Criticism must 
consist of judgments; but judgments of literature are records 
of impressions — Judicial criticism depends for content on im- 
pressions; on the other hand logical inconsistency in judgment 
is self-destructive — The question of standards and the answer 
suggested by our theory of value — The lack of formulated 
standards in the work of judicial critics what we should 
expect — Logical principles not peculiar to literature, and names 
for qualities too many to be called standards — Examples: the 
unities, probability, high seriousness — The first a logical re- 
quirement, the last neither peculiar to literature nor univer- 
sally applicable, the second either a logical requirement or the 
name of a quality, or both, usually a suggestive descriptive 
term rather than a general criterion — Summary — Conclusion. 



INTEODUCTION 

STATEMENT OF THESIS AND OUTLINE OP CONTENTS 

The thesis which I wish to defend in the present essay is a 
very common one, believed, I think, by most people, but usually 
only approximately and only half-heartedly, and expressed 
vaguely if expressed at all. Some such belief is in fact present 
whenever we reflect upon acts that stir our interest ; but the 
belief baldly expressed in propositions sounds fanciful or weak 
or sentimental, and we avoid pronouncing it clearly in much 
the same way as that in which we hurry over an expression in 
an unfamiliar language — partly from modesty, but mostly from 
fear of appearing ridiculous and from inner conviction of 
ignorance. Our belief, in other words, not only seems to us 
sentimental and weak when we approach the formulation of it 
in a creed, but it actually is sentimental and weak when thus 
formulated, and this for the reason that we have not taken the 
trouble to make the formulation accurate or definite. On the one 
hand we are afraid of seeming sentimental ; on the other hand 
we do not know what our belief really is, nor what definite 
formula embodying it will stand the test of logical criticism. 

My thesis, then, is such a belief formulated for criticism ; 
it is simply that the interest that we take in the most utilitarian 
matters indicates an interest in ideals. This is not the same as 
saying, for instance, that our taking the trouble to get out of 
bed in the morning is a proof that the Kreutzer sonata is beauti- 
ful, much less that we should enjoy hearing the Kreutzer sonata 
performed. But its intention is not far from saying that in so 
far as we are interested in living at all we impute value to life, 
and that in order to preserve our intellectual integrity we shall 
find it hard to deny value to any sort of thing that has stirred 



180 A STUDY IN TEE THEOEY OF VALVE 

the interest of any human being. Moreover, I think that it can 
be made clear that our very interest, say in money itself, the 
symbol of the economically valuable, implies so-called higher 
interests on our part; that a consideration of the value which 
we put upon the most every-day utilities logically drives us to 
admit the value of the 'finest' of the fine arts. Not that every 
one who is capable of enjoying his breakfast is capable of enjoy- 
ing poetry ; but that every human being who reflects upon the 
matter must, by virtue of logical necessity, admit in the value 
of poetry, for example, a value which has at least as genuine and 
as distinct a reality as that of the value of nourishing food or 
warm bedding. 

Perhaps some sorts of value are specifically different from 
others ; perhaps also there is a scale of values ; but the point that 
seems to me clearest and most important is that the so-called 
"sentimental" or "higher" values have as well defined a place, 
as clearly intelligible a being, as distinctly recognizable and 
necessary a function in human activity as have the most readily 
assented-to economic values. Furthermore, I should like to make 
clear that there is a sense in which it is necessary to admit that 
the very existence of these "lower" values as such depends upon 
the reality or the validity of "higher" values. Nor is the sense 
in which this is true that of an esoteric doctrine ; it is that of 
logic itself, and to realize the truth in question requires only an 
open mind and a course of thought. 

There is one other consideration to be taken into account im- 
mediately, however, in order to forestall a criticism which all 
thinking people would at once interject here. If the so-called 
' ' sentimental ' ' values are by implication logically given a definite 
status by every one who can reflectively justify the raising of his 
hand, it does not therefore follow that all the mistaken fancies 
of men are to be respected, nor that every particular evaluation 
is valid, nor that the specious and the genuine are all one. In 
fact, if the "higher" values as such are a logical implication of 
granting the ' ' lower, ' ' it may follow that they are to be criticized 



INTRODUCTION 181 

mucli as the "lower" are criticized, that the intellect is capable 
of dealing with good works as it deals with useful articles, that 
works of the spirit are subject to a logical criticism of value as 
truly as works of the flesh, in short, that esthetic and ethical and 
religious values are to be judged or criticized on no more esoteric 
grounds — complexity of grounds is of course altogether another 
matter — than the worth of shoes or of tobacco. 

My thesis is formulated, then, against all those who divide 
human activities off into exclusive departments : those who would 
insist that every man knows black from white or good from bad, 
but who think music and art, and perhaps even science, the 
cults of visionaries; those who laud scientific pursuits for their 
eminently useful practical application or their rigorous methods 
of verification, but who despise philosophy and general criticism 
on account of their supposed looseness or uselessness or arbitrari- 
ness; and finally those who respect the intellect and its logical 
standards, but who find no "reason in art," no logically sound 
standards which can be applied to taste or morals or religion. 

The contention I make, put analytically, although of course 
briefly and inadequately, is (a) that recognition of economic 
values logically implies recognition of ethical, esthetic, and re- 
ligious values, and indicates the dependence in this sense of the 
former upon the latter ; ( & ) that all these values have a common 
nature and therefore a similar status in reality, which can be 
rigorously and clearly defined; and (c) that the so-called 
"higher" values are to be criticized by the same logical pro- 
cedure as that which we apply in the case of the so-called 
"lower" values. 

To demonstrate the truth of this contention in all its details 
is more than I can accomplish in full in this essay. I shall 
therefore limit myself arbitrarily in the case of the "higher" 
values to those called ethical and esthetic, and in the main shall 
keep to the latter. The actual body of the essay is to comprise 
the following chapters: 



182 A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALUE 

I. A historical account of the problem of value theory as 
it has occurred in my own intellectual experience. This account 
seems to me essential to an appreciation of the technical dis- 
cussion which follows. It is true that any valid theory is inde- 
pendent of the particular examples of its workings ; but value 
theory in its abstract and technical development has the ap- 
pearance of being much more remote from human interests than 
it is. To indicate the genuineness of the problem involved and 
the intimate relations of more abstractly formulated conclusions 
to very concrete and apparently simple situations seems to me 
fully as important as the actual formulation of the theory itself. 
Without it the theory may appear meaningless. 

II. An account of what I should call the value experience 
in a roughly introspective description, and of what I should 
call the judgment of value in terms of elementary logic. Since 

much of the discussion of value is made difficult and obscure 
by what would seem to be confusion of these two clearly dis- 
tinguishable phases of our experience in connection with values 
and valuing, this preliminary discussion is introduced in the 
hope that the confusion may be avoided from the very first 
without any artificial abstraction or removal of either phase of 
the matter from its context, a context which usually, perhaps 
always, includes both phases. 

III. A sketch of the findings of analytical psychology bear- 
ing upon the nature of value as defined in terms of interest. 
This is a more technical discussion, and while the considerations 
introduced may seem arbitrarily chosen, they seem to me to put 
value into a psychological context which offers a satisfactory 
basis for further development of the subject. 

IV. A defense of the definition of value in terms of interest 
against the pragmatic theory of valuation or value-judgment 
as constitutive of value. This discussion is obviously called for, 
since, if the pragmatists are right, the definition given in III 
is quite beside the mark; since the intelligibility of both (a) and 
( 6 ) of the thesis depends upon keeping clear a distinction which 



INTRODUCTION 183 

the pragmatists confuse ; and since in the view of the prag- 
matists the status of value is quite different from that which 
this essay exhibits. 

V. A further examination of this definition of value in the 
light of the idealistic theory of value and value-judgment. This 
discussion attempts to show how far idealistic criticism of the 
definition points to an adequate theory of value, and in how 
far the idealistic neglect of the distinction between a judgment 
of value and an experience of valuing makes the whole ideal- 
istic theory of value unsatisfactory. 

VI. An attempt to show that judgments concerning the 
values of the most ordinarily acknowledged sorts imply the 
existence or the reality of ethical and esthetic values, and that 
these latter values have a status no less clearly definable nor 
less "real" than that of the former. This discussion is ob- 
viously the making good of the chief contention of the thesis, and 
is the main objective of the previous discussion. 

VII. An experimental study in which I shall try to show 
that the application of standards of esthetic value in literary 
criticism consists in essentially the same logical procedure as 
that employed in valuing the most ordinary economic commodi- 
ties, and that this process is capable of giving equally valid and 
satisfactory results. This last section is, of course, an attempt 
to verify, as far as a few examples from one field could amount 
to verification, the assertion in (c) of the statement of the thesis. 



CHAPTER I 

THE QUESTION AS RAISED IN PERSONAL 
EXPERIENCE 

My interest in the problem of value as such grew out of 
difificulties with apparently inadequate standards of literary 
criticism. Obviously, however, this interest was not in the main 
a literary interest, and the questions that I had been trying to 
answer seemed not to be altogether germane to literary study. 
My first attempt at finding more reliable standards was by way 
of geographic, biological, and economic antecedents ; but here 
a difficulty arose which seemed to me to suggest the need of 
philosophy rather than science. The difficulty is roughly this : 
"Antecedents" are said to "explain" Chaucer, for example, a 
biological and economic phenomenon ; but Chaucer wrote un- 
equal verse, and the interesting fact is not that Chaucer wrote 
verse but that much of this verse has been thought excellent. 

Whether the Canterbury Tales are really precious or not, 
certainly they are hu.manly precious, or at least they have been 
thought by human beings to be precious. They have been valued, 
and still are valued. No doubt also they are generally valued 
more highly than some of the other works of Chaucer. The 
evidences are too numerous to cite and too obvious to need to 
be cited ; they are suggested, for example, in the comments of 
critics and in the practice of teachers of English literature in 
selecting texts for study. The first fact, then, i.e., that the 
Canterbury Tales are valued, can scarcely be denied, and the 
second fact, i.e., that the Canterbury Tales are valued more 
highly than some other writings of Englishmen in the four- 
teenth century, or than some English writings of other centuries. 



THE QUESTION AS RAISED IN PEBSONAL EXPERIENCE 185 

will be admitted. A third fact seems to me equally interest- 
ing, viz., that the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales is valued 
more highly than, say, the Rhyme of Sir Thopas. And I think 
that we might even admit that certain lines in the Prologue 
are more highly valued than others ; certainly the general prac- 
tice of choosing particular passages for quotation would indicate 
that this is the fact. The three facts now before us are three 
facts concerning values put upon literary work, and although 
economic or other antecedents might conceivably — would obvi- 
ously — throw some light upon the particular examples I have 
used, it seems to me that such theories of antecedents, of causal 
historical determinants, have very little direct bearing on the 
points actually at issue in the present inquiry, viz., (1) the 
valuing of poetry in general as such, (2) the valuing of the 
poetry of one author or of one period above that of other authors 
or other periods, (3) the valuing of particular passages of poetry 
of one author above other passages of the same author. 

There is not time here and it would not be to the point in 
the present essay to attempt a proof of this contention that the 
study of antecedents necessarily fails to solve the problem of 
values. The point has been made over and over again. It is 
clear in Socrates' famous allusion to Anaxagoras in the Phaedo, 
in Aristotle's discussion of causes in the first book of the Meta- 
physics, in modern criticism of evolutionism as philosophy,^ and 
in the opponents of so-called scientific literary criticism.^ The 
whole argument, it seems to me, amounts to saying that minds 
are actuated by purposes directed to the future, and that, since 
no description of the past includes all the particulars of the 
future, scientific explanation of the p£LSt is inadequate for the 
discussion of purpose. In other words, we may admit a com- 
plete determinism, but when we act, i.e., so long as we remain 
human beings, we are under what may indeed be called the 
illusion oi freedom; an illusion which remains, however, the 



1 Cf . e.g., Howison, The Limits of Evolution. 

2 Cf. Ethel Puffer, The Psychology of Beauty, chap. 1. 



186 A STUDY IN THE TEEOBY OF VALUE 

central fact of conscious life, and which is therefore as real and 
as important as any fact whatever. Purpose grows out of the 
past, but it is consciously directed towards the future, and for us 
it is this conscious free direction of purpose that constitutes us 
moral beings and gives our lives value and content. 

Anthropological investigation may prove to us that art had 
an origin of some sort, a non-esthetic origin, say ; but we are 
interested in art as such just because it is that which offers 
human beings what seems to us a valuable experience. It is 
only such art as does give or has given this experience that we 
value, and it is only in so far as art is capable of giving this 
experience that we value it. "What happened, genetically speak- 
ing, before art took on this character is not to the point. Geo- 
graphic, biological, economic antecedents may offer causal ex- 
planations of the existence of objects which we now value ; they 
can scarcely give any adequate account of the specific qualities 
which we value in those objects. Or, if they can, then esthetic 
value is merely a name for something else, and literary merit — 
purely literary — is an illusion or a disguise or a euphemism. 

The function of the genetic explanation of values is like that 
of the mathematical study of music. It may be interesting and 
useful to know that the tonic vibrates twice while the dominant 
vibrates three times; but such a Pythagorean analysis gives not 
the slightest hint of the peculiar hollow sound of the consonance 
that we call a perfect fifth; and the most expert physicist may 
be completely lacking in musical appreciation. As the sound 
of a fifth is not a mathematical ratio, and as the knowledge of 
the physical nature of sound is entirely distinct from the hearing 
of consonances and dissonances, so the value of a work of art 
is not constituted by its biological or economic or other ante- 
cedents, and the knowledge of these antecedents is entirely dis- 
tinct from the valuing of the work of art. The study of such 
valuing is itself a theoretical scientific matter, but it is not a 
matter of antecedents ; it must be an account of just that element 
in experience which in the very nature of the case follows upon 



THE QUESTION AS RAISED IN PEBSONAL EXPEBIENCE 187 

and is other than its antecedents. This is the difference, as 
Croce says, between sweating and thinking, a difference more 
accurately and literally rendered, I think, in the contrasting 
terms structure and function, existence and purpose, reality and 
value, and brought into philosophical discussion under the 
heading of "mechanism vs. teleology." 

It is important to see the hard and definite character, the 
apparently final nature of this situation: If esthetic values are 
to be explained away, then it would seem very probable that 
ethical values are also to be explained away; if beauty signifies 
accord with our physiological processes, then right signifies also 
some such accord — say with the tendency to advance our group 
interests. And in either case we are dropping out of experience 
and of our discussions of experience the very characteristic of 
that experience which we set out to discuss. If one explains 
away value, one has not removed it from experience, one has 
simply removed oneself from the object of one 's search ; the 
object is there just the same ; such explanation is powerless 
against its ubiquity and its compulsion. 

The clearest presentation of the situation and of this ap- 
parent inadequacy of explanations in terms of antecedents is 
to be found in examples from everyday experience, our own 
individual experience being the nearest source. But such purely 
introspective analysis as this would involve is less striking 
evidence of the problem than is the analysis of the written 
records of such unconscious and disinterested subjects as literary 
critics or philosophical students of morality or of ethics. Ob- 
viously the interest of such writers is not primarily esthetic in 
the one case or primarily moral in the other. The literary 
critic must already have had the esthetic experience ; his criti- 
cism is in some sense or other the later record of this previous 
experience. So with the student of ethics ; he is commenting 
upon moral experience, and he must have passed this experience 
in review before his comment can be intelligent or to the point. 
The implications of what may be called these secondary 



188 A STUDY IN THE TEEOBY OF VALUE 

experiences reveal the force of some of the difficulties that have 
led to thinking of values as a central philosophical problem. 

Let us now take two or three such representative statements. 
Here is a sentence from "Windelband : ' ' The compelling power 
which Kant's philosophy gained over the hearts and minds of 
men was due chiefly to the earnestness and greatness of its 
ethical conception of the world. "^ So anti-ethical a philosopher 
as Bertrand Russell* explicitly values the ethical work of Spinoza, 
indeed grants it "immeasurable" value, in spite of its lack of 
significance for ' ' scientific ' ' philosophy ; and this value, he says, 
belongs with practice and not with theory. It is common, at 
least among university lecturers, to give a survey of an ethical 
or metaphysical system, to point out its logical fallacies and 
weaknesses, and then, in passing, to praise the nobility, the 
greatness, the practical value, the human significance of the 
very system that has just been shown to be superseded or even 
hopelessly unfounded in logic or inadequate to the facts. Theo- 
retically defective, practically valuable — as if somehow the the- 
oretical defects in a theory were not ultimately the important 
point. What student of philosophy has not heard Aristotle 
seriously expounded in a course of lectures, only to find out at 
the close that the lecturer, in spite of all the magnificent archi- 
tecture of the scheme, in spite too of all the weaknesses he may 
have pointed out in the theory itself as leading to Aristotle's 
conclusions, or the inadequacy of the conclusions to the situation, 
ends with an appreciation of the greatness of Aristotle's mind 
or a scathing condemnation of Aristotle for the unpardonable 
sin of pronouncing certain that of Avhich he had no adequate 
knowledge ? 

These are valuings, positive or negative. What is their basis ? 
Certainly the basis is not theoretical in the ordinary sense ; for 
the appreciation or the condemnation is somehow added ; it is 
distinctly ohiter dictum. It is not part of the critical discussion 



3 Windelband, History of Philosophy, p. 573. Translated by Tufts. 
* Cf . Sciejitific Method in Philosophy, Lecture 1, pp. 26 £f. 



TEE QUESTION AS RAISED IN PEESONAL EXPEEIENCE 189 

of the philosophical system in question ; it comes from the 
authority vested in the critic. And one must ask whence this 
authority is derived. What right has the critic to put practical 
value upon the theoretical work of Aristotle or Spinoza or Kant ? 

To me it seems clear that such estimates of practical value 
either helie the theoretical conclusions of their authors or are 
simply otherwise derived than from the logical considerations 
which suffice as hases for the theoretical discussion. In fact, 
all these judgments are judgments of ethical value, and coming 
as they do from the most sophisticated sources they are fairly 
clear evidence that the problem of ethical values has not been 
emphatically enough defined even for the most modern thinking. 
Or it may perhaps be put better thus : The question of values 
is simply the reappearance of one of the fundamental difficulties 
of philosophy, and it offers a new line of fortifications for our 
attack. We conclude our studies of the "great" ethical theorists 
with the pronouncing of an ethical judgment upon their work, 
which judgment, instead of being a conclusion from our studies, 
itself implies a different and apparently a more fundanieutal 
basis in our thinking. We find Aristotle and Spinoza and Kant 
all sadly lacking, but we have somehow the assurance that they 
were essentially right, essentially noble, essentially great ; that 
their work is essentially valuable. Indeed we express our assur- 
ance in a value- judgment, and thus the problem of Aristotle and 
Spinoza and Kant is before us in our own thinking, and we begin 
laboriously to discuss what we now call the theory of value. 

At this point, of course, various sorts of naturalistic answers 
may be offered. It may be said that our lecturer looks upon 
Aristotle's ethics as in itself ethically valuable just because the 
history of our planet and of the human race, the particular 
surroundings of the lecturer, his training, all the influences that 
have gone to mold his mind have a general tendency with which 
Aristotle's principles in part agree. It is this agreement with 
his own biological, economic, social, or other interests that the 
lecturer is expressing, and his terms of praise, which involve 



190 A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALUE 

the attribution of moral value to Aristotle's work, are mere 
euphemisms. That this is an inadequate account of the matter 
is suggested by the fact that it gives absolutely no account of 
the moral categories themselves. Why should naturally devel- 
oping creatures attempt to disguise their own natures from 
themselves? And how could the concept of morality or of the 
right ever have entered their minds? This, however, is a matter 
for later consideration ; I am at present only trying to make 
clear what the problem of values is in the two very familiar 
aspects in which it has been forced upon me most definitely. 
But, before I give any illustrations of esthetic value, I wish to 
go one step further in stating the problem presented by the 
examples I have already given of the ethical aspect of the 
question. 

The mere fact that we do judge Aristotle's mind or Spinoza's 
character or Kant's work valuable to human beings in general, 
or to ourselves in particular, gives us no immediate information 
as to the nature of ethical value or as to the further disturbing 
questions about the nature of ethical value, whether, that is, 
there are absolute values, whether valuing is a psychological 
activity endowing its objects with value — in this case, of course, 
what would be termed by many philosophers merely "relative" 
value — or whether on the contrary valuing implies somehow a 
substantive value which is merely acknowledged by the valuing 
subject, an objective, superpersonal, real, ultimate, "absolute" 
value, which demands our valuing activity as its just and proper 
due. Is value, in other words, like that external compulsion 
which seems to characterize reality itself? Is value forced upon 
us like the ratio of a diameter to a circumference ? Is value, to 
use Berkeley's phrasing, like the ideas of God, which we as 
lesser minds must accept and admit? Or is value dependent 
upon our individual human natures? Is it merely the further 
end, so to speak, of a relation established by our emotional con- 
sciousness, a transitory variable depending both for its existence 
and for its magnitude on human minds in particular human 



THE QUESTION AS EAISED IN PEBSONAL EXPERIENCE 191 

situations? But these considerations must also be the matter of 
a later chapter, and before I proceed to them I wish to present 
the other aspect of the problem of value with which this essay 
is concerned ; I wish to give some further illustrations of the 
case of esthetic values, particularly of literary values. 

The difficulty here is not to find, but out of a great number 
to choose, a few statements that are representative and at the 
same time disinterested — disinterested in the sense that their 
authors are not attempting to answer questions about the theory 
of value or the facts of valuing, representative in that they are, 
trying to make satisfactory value-judgments, as it is the ultimate 
business of criticism to do. It will be noticed in both the ex- 
amples that I offer here (1) that the pronouncing of value- 
judgments is the paramount interest of the writer and (2) that 
either explicitly or implicitly the writer refers to literary value 
as to an ultimate or absolute to which he pays only a proper 
respect in the very highest and most rigorous exercise of his 
mental — or perhaps what he would call his spiritual — powers. 

In the introduction to his Shakespearean Tragedy Mr. A. C. 
Bradley asserts clearly that his purpose is analytic interpreta- 
tion, but that this also im.plies value-judgment is obvious from 
the fact that he thinks his book worth writing and that the end 
of all his study is to be the more "adequate" reading of the 
plays — adequate, one may suppose, to their value. He also 
speaks in this same introduction of judging plays, and this in 
such a way as implies that the work of criticism involves judg- 
ment as its primary purpose. Certainly, at any rate, no one 
will question the fact that he does judge the plays on the basis 
of his analytic interpretation, and that his judgment is a new 
and convincing statement of the value-judgment of a great 
number of human beings. Mr. Bradley is plainly moved by the 
greatness of these tragedies, by the "value" of Shakespeare's 
view of the world as embodied in dramatic form. He speaks 
of the greatness of Lear, of the "value for imagination" of 
certain qualities of the play. He considers Lear as drama and 



19'2 A STUDY IN TEE THEORY OF VALVE 

as poetry, and he finds that its "total result is one such that 
we feel a consciousness of greatness in pain, solemnity in the 
mystery we cannot fathom!" The value of Lear is thus given 
in so many words, and the pronouncing of siieh a judgment as 
shall not only express the fact that the play has value but also 
name the particular value that the play has, is the climax and 
the end of the analytic interpretation, which is the professed 
purpose of the study. 

From the same author's first lecture in his Oxford Lectures 
on Poetry we find that he distinguishes a purely literary quality 
as the value that literature primarily has. Thus one of the most 
satisfactory of modern literary critics gives us in his work ex- 
amples of value-judgments which not only express the fact that 
we value esthetieally but as clearly imply that our value-judg- 
ments have reference to objective value. The question as to the 
nature of this objectivity — the relativity or the absoluteness, the 
dependence or the independence of this particular sort of value — 
is not explicitly raised ; but that there is for this critic a unique 
quality or character that constitutes the value of poetry as poetry 
or literature as literature, and that the adequate reading of liter- 
ature renders this value to us, seems to me a fair statement. I 
should suppose that Mr. Bradley is a Platonist in the sense of 
feeling that this valuing of poetry as poetry is significant because 
it really is a human reference to the supersensible reality. But 
in any case the critical studies cited furnish us with suggestive 
illustrations of the esthetic aspect of the problem of value. 

I have chosen one other illustration of esthetic valuation 
from Professor Saintsbury, a critic who does not take philosophy 
or esthetics too seriously, and who would certainly not find it in 
his province to discuss the nature of esthetic value. That 
esthetic value exists in the particular aspect of literary quality 
he asserts over and over again, however, and his criticism aims 
at pronouncing some sort of judgment upon the work of any 
author considering it purely as literature. Moreover, in some 



THE QUESTION AS EAISED IN PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 193 

of his critical and historical writings he makes his position in 
this respect perfectly clear. I will quote a few sentences: 

"Whether, however, Vathek had been written in three days, 
or three weeks, or three months, or three years, its literary value 
would be affected not one jot."^ 

' * Chaucer is the earliest English poet who can, without reser- 
vations and allowances, be called great, and what is more, one 
of our greatest, even to the present day. '"^ 

"The Faerie Queene is the . . . best of Spenser's work."'^ 

"Poetry, in the strict and rare sense. Swift seldom . . . 
touches. ' '^ 

' ' When Wordsworth writes 

. . . The sounding cataract 
Havinted me like a passion: 
or 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, 

even Shakespeare, even Shelley, have little more of the echoing 
detonation, the auroral light, of true poetry. No third poet in 
English . . . has anything that comes near them, though Spenser 
from this point of view must ... be put above Wordsworth."'' 

"The criticism that will be dealt with here is that function 
of the judgment which busies itself with the goodness or bad- 
ness, the success or ill-success, of literature from the purely 
literary point of view."^° 

"He [the true critic] endeavors ... to extract from all 
literature . . . lessons of its universal qualities, which may 
enable him to see each period sub specie aeternitatis."^^ 

"Some form of the Ideal Theory is indeed necessary to the 
critic ; the beauty of literature is hardly accessible, except to one 
who is more or less a Platonist. ' '^- 



5 Camb. Hist. Eng. Lit., XI, 321. 9 lUd., p. 661. 

6 Sliort Hist. Eng. Lit., p. 130. lo Hist, of Criticism, p. 3. 

7 lUd., p. 268. 11 Ibid., p. 4. 

8 Ibid., p. 350. 12 Ibid., p. 18. 



19'4 A STUDY IN THE THEOBY OF VALVE 

The real business of the critic is to look at "the intrinsic 
value of poetry, its connection with beauty, its importance to 
the free adult human spirit. "^^ 

Three points are to be noticed here especially : ( 1 ) The 
critic makes it his business to judge; (2) what he judges is 
literary value; (3) this value is conceived as objective. The 
kind of objectivity is also hinted at in the passage as to the 
Platonic qualification of the competent critic, but this need not 
concern us until later. 

To any one at all acquainted with critical writing it must 
seem superfluous to offer evidence such as I have been giving of 
the valuing activity in which critics engage. It is this essential 
passing of judgment concerning values that has made criticism 
proverbially despised. It is the fact that the critic judges that 
stirs the resentment of the author judged. It is not so much 
the unfair judging as it is the presumption which takes upon 
itself to judge at all, that the creative genius, conscious of his 
own superiority, bitterly scores and jealously resents. There 
have been critics, of course, like those of German Romanticism, 
who have sought to avoid this judging; there has been the great 
French school of "scientific" critics, from Taine to Brunetiere, 
with its theoretical condemnation of such judgment in criticism. 
But the complete failure to avoid judgment when one writes 
criticism is clear in Taine himself (one has only to notice, for 
example, the epithets which he applies to Tennyson) ; and lec- 
tures on economic or other antecedents of literary works have 
a characteristically disparaging tone that can scarcely be inter- 
preted except as the passing of judgment. Indeed the very 
attempt to explain away literary or artistic values is itself most 
likely to be actuated by a motive which follows upon a previous 
value-judgment, more or less explicitly admitted — a judgment 
that many of the accepted works of art are of doubtful value, 
i.e., are negatively valuable in that they are the products of 



13 Hist, of Criticism, p. 19. 



THE QUESTION AS EAISED IN PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 195 

misspent energies or are expressive of deplorable tendencies in 
individuals or races or epochs. 

This setting forth of the problem of the theory of value may 
seem very loose and casual ; but it seems to me fair to present the 
question as it has actually occurred in my own reflective experi- 
ence, and without rather full illustration this is unnecessarily 
difficult. The problem as I see it arises out of the fact that we find 
ourselves valuing acts and character on the one hand and what 
we may call esthetic objects on the other. Such valuing, when 
explicit, takes the form of a value-judgment — an ethical or an 
esthetic judgment. We judge one act successful as an act, right, 
another the contrary ; we judge one poem successful as a poem, 
bemitiful in some sense or other of the word, another not. And 
in doing so we are valuing the act or the poem. We thus have 
before us for consideration (a) a valuing, (&) the logical ex- 
pression of this valuing in a proposition, and (c) the matter of 
this judgment, its existential import. Does it impute real value ? 
If so, what deos real value mean in this case? Or are we here 
asking a foolish question, and is the whole matter settled in the 
imputation itself ? Is our imputation of value the ultimate source 
of value? Are values objectively imposed upon us? Or is value 
a special sort of quality existing in the object but existing only 
by virtue of the fact that the object be in relation to a valuing 
subject? 

The fundamental nature of the question seems to me clear 
from the above statement. Any adequate answer must consider 
the nature of consciousness, the nature of judgment, the possi- 
bility of knowledge, the bases of ethical theory, and the nature 
of esthetics. Not that this essay is to set all these matters straight, 
but that, being as it is professedly philosophical, it need not pre- 
tend to be able to avoid the very questions to which we all give 
answers by implication in our most casual opinions and our most 
ordinary purposes and activities. 



CHAPTER II 

PRELIMINARY ACCOUNT OF THE EXPERIENCE OF 
VALUING AND THE LOGIC OF VALUE JUDGMENTS 

Before attempting any investigation of the theory of value 
it is requisite that the experience to which such investigation 
must finally refer for empirical content or meaning be clearly 
before us. There is, in fact, the greatest danger in such dis- 
cussion not so much that we shall neglect to define terms as that 
we may forget the full meaning and reference of these terms 
after they are defined. However satisfying it may be to proceed 
along a series of more or less demonstrated propositions to a 
more or less demonstrated conclusion, this procedure is apt to 
be of very little use in illuminating a situation if the situation 
itself is not uniformly and clearly present in the mind of who- 
ever is discussing it. Such an investigator is likely to arrive 
with much apparent success at definite conclusions ; but the con- 
clusions may still fail to carry conviction or to touch upon the 
vital issues with reference to which the investigation arose. 

The only possible account of experience must of course be 
drawn from experience itself, and we get experience only in the 
first person. I will not apologize, therefore, for introducing an 
introspective account of what I think may properly be called the 
consciousness of value into a presumably rational philosophical 
essay. I can not find that the most abstract or "objective" 
treatment ever really succeeds in avoiding this its necessary 
source. Most of the disguises under which personal experience 
masquerades — as a superpersonal logic, for example, or a tran- 
scendental philosophy, or a purely experimental psychology — 
seem to me to be not only to a certain extent dangerously con- 
fusing to the readers — to whom they are not transparent — ^but 



VALUING AND THE LOGIC OF VALUE JUDGMENTS 197 

almost certainly fatal to the genuine continuity of discourse, if 
not to the intellectual integrity, of the writer, to whom they are 
apparently completely opaque. 

My two tasks for the present chapter are: (1) to describe 
the consciousness of value, and at the same time to distinguish 
at least two kinds of value, which may appropriately be called 
respectively ethical and esthetic; (2) to give an elementary ac- 
count of the logic arising out of this situation when it is made 
articulate in judgments. This is of course an arbitrary limita- 
tion of the discussion ; but conclusions which are sound within 
these limitations are all that the present essay hopes to achieve. 

The preceding chapter indicated the sort of instances in 
which such value- judgments are made ; and at the same time 
showed, I think, that in these cases the judgment does not rest 
for its validity on its immediate usefulness as an instrument to 
action. To say and at the same time to mean that a particular 
act was noble, or that a particular performance of a symphony 
was beautiful, in both cases implies at the least that a past event 
in my experience is being recorded in my mind as valuable. 
And it would seem also to be the case in both these instances 
that, when it has gone so far, my mental activity rests. Emu- 
lation of the act may be as utterly out of the question as my own 
composing or performing of the symphony. It is true that my 
attribution of value may — must, I should suppose — have some 
bearing on my past and some influence on my future valuing 
activity — in the way of giving it practice, say ; it may also 
modify my standards of value, it may enlarge my conception of 
the valuable ; but it would seem not to be instrumental, in the 
sense of being one stage in a process from a thought-provoking 
situation through a judgment (in this case a value- judgment) 
to the performance of an act — the making of a further judgment, 
for example. 

It might at first seem indeed that these judgments, concerned 
as they are with the irrevocable past, could not possibly have 
any interest of any sort for me, that they could not properly 



198 A STUDY IN THE TEEOBY OF VALUE 

be called value-judgments at all. What if Socrates did drink 
poison? What if Orion was beautiful last night? But the fact 
seems to be that the import of such judgments interests me very 
much. If Socrates' act in 399 B.C. was not noble, human life, 
my own life in particular, seems to me less worth while. If 
Orion was not beautiful last night, not only my senses but my 
judgment has deceived me, and I must be sceptical as to the 
very existence of beauty. The value-judgments do, it seems, 
express the fact that I actually attribute real value to certain 
so-called moral acts and certain so-called esthetic experiences. 
But it remains to show what this statement means; and first of 
all, having limited ourselves to two sorts of experience, we must 
make clear just what these two experiences are. 

This may perhaps be done by distinguishing them from other 
experiences of the same general sort which are even more fa- 
miliar. Many of us at least fancy that we recognize esthetic 
values; all of us recognize economic values, or at least utilities. 
And it may be as distinguished from these utility-values that 
what have traditionally been called the higher values most clearly 
reveal their essential nature. These higher values may be re- 
ligious, ethical, social, esthetic; but we are concerned only with 
esthetic and ethical values. It is with this limitation that we 
are treating of value at all. 

To take a case that offers itself at once: My typewriter is 
said to be worth so many dollars. At least I paid so many 
dollars for it, because that was the price set and because I 
thought that the typewriter would be worth having at that price. 
I do not enjoy using the typewriter — it is merely a means to 
an end; I want to be able to put what I write into such form 
that it can be conveniently and rapidly read. It is to this end 
that the typewriter is valuable to me as a means. The whole 
situation is very familiar. I value the typewriter. By impli- 
cation I value the production of steel and iron, rubber and ink ; 
the labor of men in mines and factories, of teachers in commer- 
cial schools, of printers and paper makers; of engineers and 



VALUING AND THE LOGIC OF VALUE JUDGMENTS ]99 

inventors; and so on into the endlessly interrelated world of 
useful activities. But all these values are relative to each other, 
and they are moreover relative to other sorts of value. In fact 
they are valuable finally only as means toward the ' ' good life. ' ' 
It is this "good life" that we ultimately value, even if we find 
it itself valuable only as a means to a better life hereafter. But 
for those of us whose interests end with this human life itself, 
and for all of us, I suppose, in some pretty clear sense, the good 
life is an end. What interests us most of all, therefore, is the con- 
tent, the components, the constituents of this good life. And 
we value these contents themselves more highly than any sub- 
sidiary means thereto. "We may value them more than life itself, 
as obviously Socrates did, as all the most admired of our heroes 
do; and we may call them, figuratively perhaps, but with the 
consent of ordinary usage, the ultimate values, meaning by 
values simply what we think worth while, and altogether begging 
the question of the nature of what we thus ultimately value. 

To learn more about the nature of our values in the sense 
of value just noted we may turn again to our individual ex- 
perience. Any one, I suppose, values what we call the moral 
character of Socrates. All of us agree, that is, that Socrates 
was what we call a great man. In particular, all of us think 
of Socrates' refusal to save himself from death as a noble act; 
thinking thus is placing ethical value on the act ; it implies the 
consciousness of ethical value in us; it is, when formulated in 
words, the pronouncing of an ethical value-judgment. It may 
here be objected that as we value a typewriter for its service 
to an ulterior end, so we value Socrates' life, and in particular 
the manner of his death, as serving to point out a satisfactory 
mode of procedure, or as suggesting to us an ideal of conduct, 
or as pleasing to our pride in the possibilities of human nature — 
as in one of many ways a means to an ulterior end. But even 
if we should grant this, the fact remains that Socrates' act serves 
us in so definitely different a manner from that in which the 
typewriter serves us or that in which the African rubber 



200 A STUDY IN THE THEOB¥ OF VALUE 

gatherers serve us — the manner is so different as to be appropri- 
ately designated absolutely different — ^this expression in any- 
more literal sense being fairly meaningless. Thus the difference 
between ethical value and utility-value is that what has the 
latter sort of value is always, as an economic good, only rela- 
tively valuable; that which has ethical value, while it is also 
(or at least may be considered to be) valuable relatively, is not 
judged primarily in relation to other values at all, and never 
in relation to other merely relative values. Ethical value can 
not be measured in terms of economic goods or even in terms 
of ethical goods. It is valuable simply as being constitutive of 
the ultimately valuable, as being part of what goes to make up 
that which we think of as ultimately worth while. It is, in 
other words, not a means but an end. 

But even ethically valuable acts seem, too, to be means in 
a special way of their own ; for we do acknowledge, when we 
praise Socrates, that his act is good, i.e., of the sort to be emu- 
lated. It also furnishes us with a criterion of ethical value, 
and perhaps enlarges our idea of the possibilities of ethical value. 
From this point of view, in fact, the whole value of Socrates 
may be said to be that he exemplifies the good life in a high 
degree, and that for us now this is his only value. But this 
point of view apparently shuts oft' a perspective in which we 
simply contemplate Socrates' act with satisfaction. And it is 
in just this perspective that Socrates means the protagonist of 
The Apology, the Crito, and the Phaedo; that Socrates becomes 
an object of esthetic rather than ethical value-judgment. Ethi- 
cally valuable is Socrates ' act in refusing to obey his daemon ; 
esthetically valuable is the Socrates of The Apology to whom 
we listen in rapt attention. The ethically valuable act is a model 
for us to follow ; in so far, indeed, Socrates is a means to an 
end, albeit a universal, ethical end. But the esthetically valuable 
creation of Plato is an object of contemplation pure and simple. 
In fact, it is only as we reach the stage of esthetic contemplation 
that the object of thought has value no longer as means at all, 



VALUING AND THE LOGIC OF VALUE JUDGMENTS 201 

but solely as end. Esthetic value, in a fuller sense even than 
ethical value, belongs to the realm of ends. Both are clearly 
enough distinguished from utility values, which are such only 
as they serve towards ends, and which always ultimately serve 
ethical or esthetic ends, ends of a higher order, so to speak. 
Objects of ethical value, if they are means, are means to ethical 
ends, not to ends of a higher order — unless, indeed, as ethically 
valuable, they become the objects of esthetic contemplation, and 
thus force us to call esthetic ends a still higher order, to which 
ethically valuable objects as such may be subsidiary. 

Esthetic objects are valuable in themselves, simply as such 
objects, and whenever an object becomes valuable simply as 
object — out of all other relations but that of its objectivity — 
it is esthetic value that it possesses. If there is one mark of 
the esthetic consciousness that is definite and pronounced, it is 
the intrinsic or isolated nature of the experience. It is in 
fact this intrinsic value of esthetic experience, this resting in 
itself, that blinds philosophers, as well as the rest of those who 
look down upon art as more or less admissible trifling, to the 
truth that esthetic values are values at all. And this in face 
of the fact that the very ethical acts that we prize most highly, 
as soon as they are valued solely for their intrinsic ethical 
quality, become objects of just what we mean by esthetic con- 
templation. When anything becomes valued not as one stage 
in a process, nor as one of a series of conditions, our conscious- 
ness of it takes on those characteristics which theorists unani- 
mously make the constituent moments of the esthetic conscious- 
ness; and thus esthetically valuable objects are the objects of 
value- judgments par excellence, and for this very reason are 
often not grasped theoretically as valuable at all. 

All this may sound dogmatic and speculative. It purports, 
however, to be nothing more than the report of individual ex- 
perience. The more general phrasing is used as further charac- 
terizing the experience in question, the very essence of which 



202 A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALUE 

seems to be that, to use Kant's terms, it pronounces itself "uni- 
versal and necessary." When I call the symphony beautiful, 
I mean that it is of such a nature that any listener must have 
felt enough as I felt to agree with me in calling it beautiful, 
would he only be fully receptive and open-minded. And so 
when I speak of our valuing the Socrates of The Apology in a 
particular way, I mean that I value this Socrates, and that I 
cannot conceive of a disinterested human being who should read 
The Apology without appreciating, essentially as I do, this 
esthetic object. I may be Avrong in this judgment, but as Kant 
pointed out long ago, I can not make myself think that I am 
wrong here, for it is the very nature of the value-judgment to 
feel itself universally binding. Thus it is the part of honesty 
not to conceal this weakness, especially if it is really the only 
source of strength. It is after all only one form of the very 
presupposition I make when I expect my words to be read or 
my thought to be followed ; and it would seem to me foolish and 
perhaps misleading not to make explicit acknowledgment of it. 

The present chapter has simply attempted, then, to give a 
descriptive account of the valuing activity ; and, while the terms 
have not been technically psychological, the account will serve, 
I think, as a basis for further discussion. I have merely tried 
to make plain the experiential content to which the term valuing 
is to have reference throughout this essay. That this is not the 
same content as is referred to by many writers on the theory 
of value ; that it has various relations to such contents, etc., etc., 
are matters to be considered later. For the present we are to 
attempt a brief and elementary logical analysis of the value- 
judgment ; and with these two items before us we may proceed to 
more accurate construction and more specific criticism. 

Kant has, I think, clearly given the typical form of the value- 
judgment. The expression of being conscious of value is the 
judgment that an act is right or that an object is beautiful. 
The meaning of this ethical judgment is elaborated in Kant's 
ethical theory ; the logical implications of the esthetic judgment 



VALUING AND THE LOGIC OF VALUE JUDGMENTS 203 

give rise directly to most of the Critique of Judgment ; and it 
would perhaps be as enlightening to study some of the sections 
of Kant's work as to attempt a more independent investigation. 
But this would require a great deal of preliminary discussion, 
and Kant has been annotated and commented into such varied 
import that to employ his terms, not to mention his doctrines, 
would rather introduce confusion into the subject than help set 
it in order. However that may be, our starting point is essen- 
tially that of Kant in the third critique ; and if we have any 
success, it will be largely due to his pointing out this road as 
the direct one to the center of the difficulty. 

The actual logic of the situation seems at first sight not to 
be very complex. The two propositions appear to be simple 
enough, and formally, no doubt, they are so. Their existential 
import, however, is quite another matter. For the proposition. 
This act is right, offers no clue to the meaning of act or the 
meaning of right, except as it relates them to each other as sub- 
ject and predicate. So with the other judgment — the esthetic 
object as such is no more the merely physical object than 
Socrates' moral act was the mere putting of the cup to his lipa 
and the swallowing of the poison. Moreover, the predicates are 
even less informing; for the only subjects of which right (in the 
moral sense) can be predicated, are precisely m^orally right acts, 
and the only beautiful objects are just those objects of the 
esthetic value-judgment that we can place as subject of are when 
we use beautiful as predicate. Both judgments appear to be the 
barest, most formal tautologies, and both are thus nice examples 
of the difficulty of judgment in general, viz., that it is always 
either false or else tautological and thus meaningless. The ways 
out of this dilemma are not far to seek in the multifarious paths 
of modern logical investigation ; but all I wish to do for the 
present is to make a few remarks on a simple Aristotelian basis. 

In the first place as to the difficulty itself, if ethical and 
esthetic value-judgments are meaningless, so are all judgments, 
and on this score we need have no more misgivings as to the 



204 A STUDY IN THE TREOBY OF VALUE 

existence of goodness and beauty than we have as to the existence 
of the objects of our external world in general or as to the ex- 
istence of any useful object. In the second place this old dilemma 
as to all judgments is not one to concern us, for there is clearly 
something wrong in the analysis. The falsity of all judgments 
leaves the word false without meaning, and it is easy to show 
the absurdity of the other horn of the dilemma as to tautology 
or meaninglessness. Rational discourse does have meaning; it 
is the embodiment of what we mean by the word. But the very 
unit of rational discourse is the judgment, and to call judgment 
meaningless is thus a contradiction. If judgment is meaningless, 
then the word meaning no longer means what we use it to mean ; 
and in general there is no use in talking, except perhaps for 
the purposes of physical exercise. Possibly this is just what 
human life is, a sort of motion ; but human beings can not think 
so, and they do not mean any such merely physical activity when 
they speak of human life, especially when they explicitly make 
value-judgments. As to the tautological nature of judgments 
in general, this needs only to be noted to be acceptable — as far 
as it has any meaning. If knowledge is a complete system, then 
to know the whole would be to see existence suh specie aeterni- 
iatis, and there would be no judgments to m^ake ; existence itself 
would be tautological and time would disappear. But this would 
seem to mean just nothing at all, and at any rate we are speaking 
of what can not possibly be any concern of human beings. The 
. simple fact that we do make judgments about temporal exist- 
ences remains, and tautology, in any proper or intelligible sense 
of the word, characterizes judgments which seem to us not to 
predicate anything of the subject. Tautological thus charac- 
terizes one sort of judgment, and its very meaning depends upon 
there being judgments which in this sense are not tautological, 
this sense being the only one in which tautological means any- 
thing at all. To call all judgments tautological is thus itself 
altogether without meaning. 



VALUING AND THE LOGIC OF VALUE JUDGMENTS 205 

And now that we have avoided this artificial dilemma in its 
own quibbling fashion, let us see whether we can refute it by a 
jnore substantial argument, in its direct bearing upon the value- 
judgments that we are investigating. To call such judgments 
meaningless involves us in the real difficulty to which this essay 
addresses itself. For if ethical and esthetic value-judgments are 
either false or else tautological and meaningless (i.e., not judg- 
ments at all, but mere repetitions of names), then there is no 
element of meaning left in ethics or esthetics ; there are no such 
things as moral or esthetic values. If nothing can be called 
right or beautiful (i.e., if no value-judgments of the sort can be 
made), if right and beautiful can not be used as predicates in 
assertions that say something and mean something, then they 
are not of any use at all to us; they should be removed from 
our vocabularies, and such terms should be substituted as would 
offer a means of making valid assertions in the situation already 
illustrated so often in this essay, and described in the first 
part of this chapter as value-consciousness. We have refuted 
the logical quibble about judgment in general; we have not by 
any means proved that value- judgments are valid or even that 
they can have meaning. 

Let us turn at once, then, to a consideration of some of the 
suggestions for improving our vocabulary, so to speak ; and first 
of all, let us turn to psychology, which would seem to offer the 
kind of improvement that we are seeking. 



CHAPTER III 

AN ACCOUNT OF VALUE AS INTEREST IN TERMS OF 
PSYCHOLOGY 

When we do turn to psychology for help, inevitable as the 
appeal is, we still do not find a very clear answer. The psycho- 
logical school of value theorists have, in fact, done little, as 
psychologists, to throw light on our questions. We are seeking 
the place or function of value and valuation in our world of 
experience, particularly in two regions of this world which are 
indicated when we say that we wish to know what Ave really 
mean by praising a book, pronouncing it satisfactory, i.e., valu- 
able, and what we mean by pronouncing a man's act noble, i.e., 
valuable (apparently in another field). Obviously these pro- 
nouncements are both records of our experience (of the book 
or of the act) and estimates with an at least apparent reference 
to some standard or other, the origin and nature of this stand- 
ard being matters for further question. To get any adequate 
idea then of our meaning, we shall have (1) to know what the 
original experience is upon which our explicit judgment follows ; 
(2) to examine the experience which is constituted in the judg- 
ment itself; and (3) to consider the remaining problem of the 
implications of the judgment, involving, one would suppose, a 
reference to a standard, a standard which must be at least in 
so far logical as it constitutes the criterion of the truth of a 
judgment — the logical entity in question. The question at which 
we had really arrived in the preceding pages is (2) above, 
namely, the question as to the nature of the judging experience 
itself when we are judging values. But it is obvious, I think, 
that in so far as this is an act of judgment, it is like other acts 
of judgment. In so far as it is a judgment of value, we are led 



VALUE AS INTEREST IN TEEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY 207 

to enquire as to the nature of value itself, the subject-matter 
of the judgment. According to the traditional classification of 
judgments, then, we are not dealing with a specific type of 
formal judgment at all, but simply with a specific sort of 
material, namely, what we may loosely call vahie. Since we 
are interested in our meaning, however, when we make the judg- 
ment, we must investigate that reality, if it turn out to be a 
reality, to which our judgment refers. What then is value ? 

It is with this question that the psychological investigators^* 
begin ; and, although the ground of value is not agreed upon 
among them, whether, that is, value is based upon feeling, or 
desire, dispositional or in action, still in their definitions and 
by means of the critical study of these definitions, we find a 
more or less general agreement that value is the fulfillment of 
interest. ^^ As would be expected, a psychological investigation 
finds value in consciousness — whether a truly empirical investi- 
gation finds it there or not is another question. But waiving 
the claims of a more radical empiricism, and taking the definition 
as given, what does it tell us? 

It would seem to give us psychological information and to 
make psychological reference. For interest would seem to name 
the attitude of a conscious organism towards that part of its 
environment that it selects to react upon, and the reactions of 
a conscious organism are certainly in large part determined by 
its built-up constitution. Evidently I value prima facie what 
suits me, and just as evidently I value in the long run what 
suits me in the long run. Leaving out entirely the question of 
value in general, we at least find that particular valuations de- 
pend upon the constitution of particular human minds, and 
more specifically upon particular human characteristics — the 
constitution of particular dispositions, the nature of particular 
desires. 



1* Such as Ehrenf els, Meinong, and Urban. 

15 See Ealph Barton Perry, ' ' The Definition of Value, ' ' Jour, of Phil- 
osophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, XI, 141. 



208 A STUDY IN THE TEEOEY OF VALUE 

These characteristics have been explicitly discussed as consti- 
tuting value by a group of authors, who, while they are not 
always in close agreement, seem, in so far as they treat of value 
at all in their investigations, to follow the same general direction.. 
Their psychology, like other psychologies, may be said to as- 
sume uncritically a metaphysics and an epistemology. But it 
may be doubted, I think, whether one can so much as pronounce 
a single sentence of any sort of discourse without doing as much ; 
and since this is the case even in the most careful attempts not 
to make assumptions, in the case, that is, of the very bases of 
the most "fundamental" criticism of psychology, one may as 
well make the minimum psychological assumptions, and come 
to any necessary revision of them later. In fact, we have no 
doubt made such a number of interrelated and heaped-up as- 
sumptions that we have as much warrant for proceeding on the 
grounds of careful introspection as on any other ground, perhaps 
more. 

Let us turn then to the constitution of value as seen in 
general outline by Ribot, Shand, McDougall, and Stout. The 
fundamentally important ideas here are Shand 's conception of 
the sentiments and Ribot 's conception of what he chooses to call 
the "judgment" of value. 

The passages that make this connection between interest and 
value through the conception of the sentiments are brief and 
simple. According to Stout,^® who credits this conception to 
Shand, the child's interest in his mother as the source of satis- 
factions generates an interest in his mother herself and all her 
activities. This organized interest, based on emotional exper- 
iences centering about one object, is a sentiment, and all senti- 
ments "involve the valuing of an object for its own sake and 
not merely for advantages derivable from it."" Vahiing is 
thus having a more or less permanent interest in ; having a senti- 
ment "directed toward" an individual, a social group, or a 



16 G. F. Stont, The Groundworlc of Psychology, pp. 221 ff. 
iT Ihid., p. 223. 



VALUE AS INTEREST IN TEEMS OF PSTCHOLOGY 209 

"general aspect of the life of the self," such as love of order, 
devotion to art, detestation of servility.^^ 

In this conception of the sentiments, as suggested by Shand, 
adopted by Stout and McDougall, and developed and applied 
in Shand 's The Foundations of Character, we find some help in 
describing the experiences we pass in review when we judge that 
a person or a book is admirable. In the light of Shand 's doc- 
trine of the sentiments our admiration is explained by the fact 
that our interests have become organized about certain indi- 
viduals or certain aspects of our experience and that the person 
or the book in question seems to us to further these organized 
interests, if only by implying on the part of the person judged 
or in the book a sentiment directed towards the same object or 
aspect of experience. We value Socrates' act in so far, and 
only as adequately as we have a sentiment like his which we 
may call 'hatred of injustice."" We value Chaucer's poetry 
in so far as it is successful in expressing the various sentiments 
(in this technical sense of the word) that we sympathize with 
and grasp as being somehow allied to our own. 

In what sense all this is true is quite another matter ; but 
that here is an organized, satisfactory account of our experience 
with which it is hard to differ, I think must be granted. And 
in that case any criticism, no matter how fundamental, mast 
interpret this account, just as the most sophisticated theory of 
reality must take into account, and fail if it can not take into 
account, our seeing tables and chairs in a classroom. We must 
start from experience, and I should claim for the conception of 
the sentiments that it is a sound rendering of experience to be 
criticized entirely on its merits as such, and that it does not 
stand or fall with the destruction or maintenance of such theo- 
retical absurdities as it may even professedly be built upon. 
No one with the least sense of humor can take altogether seri- 
ously, I should suppose, the psychologist's theorizing about 



^8 Ibid., p. 228. 
19 Ibid., p. 228. 



210 A STUDY IN TEE TEEOBY OF VALUE 

psychology as we find it for instance in the early chapters of 
the very book I have been quoting ; but to discard later chapters 
in toto on the ground that the early chapters involve theoretical 
absurdities is like refusing to take into account the law of 
gravitation because you think Newton's conception of space and 
time inadequate. 

Ribot's conception of a judgment of value is neither so clear 
nor so empirically satisfying as Shand's or Stout's conception 
of the sentiments. Value for Ribot is defined in a larger theo- 
retical scheme which he calls the logic of the feelings. This, he 
says, is constituted "principally" of values, i.e., "concepts or 
judgments varying according to the dispositions of feeling and 
of will."-" The purpose of this "logic of the feelings" is always 
the establishing of an opinion or a belief, and it begins with 
the opinion to be established and justifies it by a "synthesis of 
these values" which "takes on the appearance and gives the 
illusions of a demonstration."-'^ 

Ribot's concept of a "synthesis of values" is not very clear, 
but the procedure which he is describing is familiar as that of 
the rhetorician or orator as distinguished from that of the phil- 
osopher or reasoner ; and it may very well be the character of 
most of our so-called reasoning. It throws little light, however, 
on our problem of the nature of value, excepting as a descrip- 
tion in not altogether unambiguous terms of one of the exper- 
iences which pretends to be the founding of a judgment of value, 
but which seems to be nothing more than the assuming of values, 
and a more or less unscrupulous justifying of our judgment that 
they are acceptable. 

But Ribot in a later study defines judgment of value as 
"the logical operation which is at the bottom of all passion."-^ 
It contains two elements, he says, "the one intellectual, the 
other emotional, the agreement of which varies in degree and in 
importance according to the particular cases. "^^ "The action 



20 Kibot, Logique des Sentiments, p. 61. 

21 Ibid., p. 63. 

22 Essai sur les Passions, p. 36. 

23 Ibid., p. 37. 



VALUE AS INTEBEST IN TEEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY 211 

of this judgment of value is to reinforce the affective element 
in the states of consciousness called out by circumstances, and 
to carry along in a single current those which will serve the 
purpose of the fixed idea."-* The purport of this is not very 
different from Stout's statement that "interest progressively 
defines itself in cognition, and in defining itself transforms 
itself."-^ But certainly, also, it is not clearer nor more illumi- 
nating, and it adds the confusion involved in finding a logical 
operation at the bottom of all "passion," which logical oper- 
ation itself has both an intellectual and an emotional element. 
Obviously logical for Eibot is applicable not merely to intellec- 
tual operations; and this seems to me rather a confusing use of 
terms than the necessary expression of an insight into the nature 
of the mental activities in question. 

But, dismissing this confusion as one which we shall have 
to deal with in another form when we consider the "judgment 
of practice, ' ' of the pragmatists, and remarking that Ribot uses 
Dewey's form of statement of value-judgment to give the "con- 
clusion from a series of value-judgments, "-'' we may at least 
note that Ribot corroborates in part the notion that value is 
another name for interests, whether organized into sentiments 
or not. In fact he comes very close to Shand's or Stout's ideas 
both of character and of value. Values he finds to be subjective 
in that they are "the direct expression of our individuality," 
acts of valuing of a subject.-' Following Ehrenfels, appar- 
ently, he defines value as the capacity of things to provoke 
desire, and as being proportional to the strength of the desire, 
thus making the motive, as he says, ' ' essentially ' ' but not ' ' abso- 
lutely" subjective.-^ It is not so much, however, where he 
follows value theorists, as in his own investigations of the "logic 
of passion" that he gives us the more essential corroboration of 
the view of Shand and Stout, which by means of the conception 
of the sentiments makes value as the expression of interest more 



2* Ibid., p. 37. 27 Logique, etc., p. 40. 

2o Groundwork, p. 221. -& Ibid., p. 41. 

26 Essai, etc., p. 7. 



212 A STUDY IN TEE THEORY OF VALUE 

fully comprehensible and puts the whole idea of value into a 
serviceable and intelligible psychological context. 

The psychological school of value theorists has been inter- 
ested in defining value as a basis for a science of value, but 
this empirical science itself is not much to our present purpose. 
We began with an attempt to make clear and explicit our own 
meaning in such simple assertions as that Socrates was a great 
man or that Chaucer wrote some fine tales. We found that in 
the first statement we apparently meant more than that Socrates 
fulfilled certain biological and economic laws. The morality of 
his act seemed at least other than its mere agreement with our 
ideas of the most useful thing to do in the light of his own 
interests or of ours. We found that in calling Chaucer's poetry 
fine, we thought that we meant more than that Chaucer was a 
scientifically explainable phenomenon. But we questioned our 
right to this "added" meaning; and in the present chapter we 
have tried to see whether, in terms of psychology, we could not 
explain our attribution of value on a scientific basis, which should 
give us at least a better terminology. We have so far seen that 
in terms suggested by Shand and Ribot our valuations are ex- 
pressions of sentiments "directed toward" objects or "other 
more abstract aspects of experience," and that values are "essen- 
tially" if not "absolutely" subjective. But while this view 
agrees in general with the concepts of value of Meinong, Ehren- 
fels, and Urban, and is the basis of their science of values, it is 
not by a study of that science made much clearer as a particular 
type of experience. This science of values gives rather the de- 
notation of value. We are looking for the connotation. What 
distinguishes valuing from other experiences? In particular, 
when we have valued an object, and when we then pronounce 
a judgment which expresses this fact, what does our judgment 
mean ? 

We have seen that at least in an intelligible sense we value 
objects in so far as they fulfill interests. And we have seen 



VALUE AS INTEREST IN TEEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY 213 

that it is our sentiments that are the subject side of this valuing. 
Our judgment, when we judge that an object has value, would 
thus seem to be our reflective expression of the fact that the 
object in question fulfills some interest or other ; and while we 
shall be told that this is a "merely psychological" formulation 
of the matter, the fact remains that any more fundamental view 
must take this one into account without falsifying it as it stands, 
namely, as an empirical account of a very common experience. 
But before we go further in the investigation of our problem, 
which is that of making as explicit and full as possible the 
meaning of our judgment that Socrates was good or Chaucer's 
poetry great or fine or beautiful, there is an obvious theoretical 
consideration to give us pause. No matter what more we may 
add, no matter what interpretation we may offer, we have said 
in so many words that value is fulfillment of interest, and in so 
doing we have said what sounds very much like saying that the 
good is the desirable. We have thus called down upon ourselves, 
if not an actually formulated and incontrovertible destruction of 
our view, at least a parallel criticism of it which might very' easily 
be formulated. It is such criticism that Professor Perry has at- 
tempted to meet in the last part of his article on the Definition of 
Value.^^ He meets the arguments that qualify interest in various 
ways before admitting its fulfillment to be value, by reducing 
the qualities to quantities. "What is the fulfillment of collective 
interest, or higher interest, or more permanent interest but more 
fulfillment of interest? I think it can be shown that whether 
this reduction be theoretically sound or not it is rather the 
shutting of our eyes to essential differences than the gaining 
of insight through the vision of a common character. The chief 
motive to the study of value is just these obvious differences, 
and a solution of the problem that attempts to do away with 
them by finding a common principle is like an account of a 
tennis tournament in terms of laws of physics. The very point 



29 Jour. Phil. Psych, and Sci. Methods, XI, 141. 



214 A STUDY IN THE TEEOEY OF VALUE 

of the game is that, both players being governed entirely by phys- 
ical conditions, one of them wins the match, while the other loses 
it. Professor Perry's answer might suggest that the philo- 
sophical consideration of the match might very well be the state- 
ment of the law of gravitation ; and that on the other hand the 
details of matters of value and valuation are to be sought in 
just those sciences of value that I have said throw little light 
on our problem. But, to push the analogy still further, I should 
say that while the science of valuation might be compared to 
a detailed study of the technique of tennis and tennis playing, 
and the law of gravitation as accounting for the physical move- 
ments of the ball might be compared to the relation of interest 
to value, as an explanatory principle, there remains still on 
the one hand the tennis match and on the other our valuations 
as the data that we wish considered. The comparison proves 
nothing at all, but if there is something important and inter- 
esting to be said about value which is not in the way of a science 
of valuation, and which refuses to stop with a philosophical 
definition in terms of interest, the best proof of this will be a 
satisfactory sequel to our present investigation. 

I have already suggested that a more radical empiricism 
than that of most psychological investigation might give us 
quite another view of value and value- judgment ; and before 
going on to what seems to me the most important part of our 
subject, namely, what our judgment of value really means, what 
it implies concerning experience in general and what it implies 
in particular about kinds of value, I shall try to give a brief 
account of the value-judgment or the judgment of practice as 
this has been differentiated and discussed, particularly by Dewey. 
This account should furnish a transition from a more or less 
psychological to a more or less logical treatment, for while Dewey 
is professedly logical, his conception of logic allows him to be 
empirical and so to take into account what would ordinarily be 
called purely psychological considerations. 



CHAPTER rv 

THE PRAGMATIC THEORY OF VALUATION AS 
EXPOUNDED BY DEWEY 

In the last chapter I tentatively presented a definition of 
value formulated in terms of liking and disliking, in terms of 
interest ; more precisely this definition makes value subjective 
in the sense that anything is properly said to have value in 
case, and only in case, it is the object of the affective motor re- 
sponse which we call in general liking or disliking, or which 
we call being interested in, positively or negatively. The ques- 
tion will at once be asked, Does judgment make no difference 
here? Is the value already constituted before any judgment 
concerning the object in question has been pronounced? And 
the answer in terms of the definition as given is altogether 
unambiguous. Judgment has nothing to do with the presence 
of value as such. For example, hell has value, or the popular 
evangelist's presentation of hell torments has value just in so 
far as hell, or the evangelist's presentation of the torments of 
hell, is the object of a motor-affective response on the part of 
a subject, which response in this particular supposed case might 
be disgust or fear or loathing or some similar attitude. A 
member of the evangelist's audience who had entertained this 
attitude would, by virtue of so doing, have invested the object 
of his dislike with value, in this case negative value. He might 
upon reflection almost immediately pronounce any one of a great 
number of judgments concerning the evangelist, or the evan- 
gelist's presentation of the torments of hell; but these would 
not anywise annul the original value which was constituted by 
the motor-affective attitude above mentioned. If I look at the 
sunshine on a white stone wall and enjoy it, then this sunshine 



216 A STUDY IN TEE THEORY OF VALUE 

ou the white stone wall is valuable by virtue of my enjoyment. 
I may judge that I should have kept my eyes on my book or 
on the lecturer, or that looking at the sunshine is bad for my 
eyes, or anything else I am capable of judging; but these sub- 
sequent judgments will not deny the truth of the assertion that 
the sunshine was valuable, any more than they will alter the 
fact that I enjoyed it ; for the value was constituted onee and 
for all by this enjoyment. This may seem like harping on one 
string, but it is very important to have this distinction between 
motor-affective attitude and judgment clearly in mind before 
we survey any more equivocal or ambiguous theory of value or 
even any elaboration of a theory based on our tentative definition 
in terms of interest. 

Even in Dewey's own theory, which it is the object of this 
chapter to present as the most fully worked out and most author- 
itative of the pragmatic views, even here the keeping clear of 
this distinction is imperative, whether Dewey himself succeeds 
completely in doing so or not. Dewey at any rate sees the dis- 
tinction, and if he ends by losing sight of it, this is because he 
has made it unrecognizable except, perhaps, by careful analysis. 
He has, so to speak, shifted it along to a position where it is 
less easy to detect. 

His explicit recognition of it, and of the danger of confusion 
subsequent upon a failure to see it, is made as follows ■.^*' ' ' There 
is," he says, "a deep-seated ambiguity which makes it difficult 
to dismiss the matter of value . . . summarily" (p. 512). He 
continues : ' ' The experience of a good and the judgment that 
something is a value of a certain kind and amount, have been 
almost inextricably confused" (p. 512). His own position is 
that of Hume in the Treatise of Human Nature, pt. Ill, iii, 



30 Tliese quotations, as are all the rest in this chapter, are taken from 
an article in the Journal of Pliilosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 
vol. 12, no. 19, the issue for September 16, 1915. The article is entitled 
' ' The Logic of Judgments of Practise. " It is reprinted with a good deal 
of elaboration and some minor changes in Essays in Ea'perimental Logic, 
University of Chicago Press, 1916, from which I have taken the expres- 
sions ' ' value of reason ' ' and ' ' value of behavior. ' ' 



DEWEY S PEAGMATIC THEOEY OF VALUATION 217 

whom he quotes as follows: "A passion is an original existence 
. . . "When I am. angry I . . . have no more a reference to any 
other object than when I am thirsty, or sick, or more than five 
feet high" (p. 513).^^ To quote Dewey himself again: "Only 
a prior dogma to the effect that every conscious experience is, 
ipso facto, a form of cognition leads to any obscuration of the 
fact" (p. 513) . . . the fact, namely, that motor-affective atti- 
tudes are clearly distinct from cognitive judgments. 

It is true that judgments and motor-affective attitudes may 
be dependent upon each other in various ways, and this fact 
is very easy to illustrate. If I were not in a position to judge 
that a particular object before me on the table is a volume of, 
say, the Journal of PhilosopJiy, I should not value the object, 
perhaps; i.e., my valuing of this object may depend upon the 
prior judgment that the object is a particular book. But the 
prior judgment is one thing; my liking or valuing of the book 
another. On the other hand, I am capable of judging that 1 
liked a particular book ; but this judgment that I liked the object 
is distinctly not identical with the liking. The judgment in 
this case follows the liking in time, and it would seem to depend 
upon it in a perfectly definite way ; but the judgment is not 
the same as the liking. Such possible dependence of judgments 
on likings and dislikings, or of likings and dislikings on the 
previous making of judgments — such dependence of one on the 
other is only the more reason for keeping the two distinct in 
our minds. Otherwise there is little hope of intelligently analyz- 
ing the relations between them.^^ 



31 This is the view that Professor Mackenzie deprecates in his criticism 
of Ehrenfels in "Notes on the Theory of Value," Mind, n. s., vol. 4, p. 429. 
"On the whole he [Ehrenfels] appears to mean that our irrational feel- 
ings and impulses have a priority over oui' rationally determined ends, 
and that the worth which we attribute to the latter must in the long run 
be explained by the presence of the former. Now this view seems to me 
to be a relic of Hume 's doctrine of the subordination of reason to passion. 
. . . Its illusory appearance of truth is due to our tendency to think of 
each of our desires and impulses as an independent force; instead of 
recognizing that they are elements in a more or less systematic whole, 
and take their character from the totality within which they stand." 

32 For further illustration of this distinction see Essays in Experimental 
Logic, pp. 355 ff. 



218 A STUDY IN TEE THEOBY OF VALUE 

But although Dewey makes this distinction clearly, he is 
equally clear about disagreeing with the definition of value in 
terms of interest as given above in the present chapter, for accord- 
ing to him value is not subjective, ^^ nor is valuing in any sig- 
nificant sense to be confused with those motor-affective attitudes 
which we call holding dear, or cherishing, or caring for, or neg- 
lecting or condemning (p. 520). To call the objects of these 
attitudes values is, he says, merely repeating that they are loved, 
cherished, neglected, etc. (p. 520). Our definition in terms of 
interest he thus apparently considers mere tautology.^* His 
sentence is as follows: "To call these things (viz., cherished, 
loved, etc., things) values is just to repeat that they are loved, 
and cherished ; it is not to give a reason for their being loved and 
cherished" (p. 520). Such a statement indicates, it seems to 
me, in the first place that he does admit the use of the word 
value in the sense of our definition in terms of interest, but 
that the definition seems to him not significant, or at least that 
value in this sense is not worth investigating.^^ In the second 
place this sentence of Dewey's which accuses our definition of 
irrelevance for his purposes, suggests that the significant mode 
of attack is one which does attempt to "give a reason" for lov- 
ing and cherishing, i.e., for valuing in precisely this irrelevant 
or unimportant sense. Dewey suggests, in other words, that 
the giving of a reason for loving and cherishing would avoid 
the tautology and answer the purpose of an investigation of 
value. This would seem to imply that to give the reason for 



33 "The conclusion is not tliat the value is subjective, but that it is 
practical." Jour, of Phil., Psycliol. and Sci. Methods, vol. 12, p. 516. 

3* Cf. Mackenzie 's article above referred to, p. 433, for a similar 
criticism of Ehrenfels' position on the nature of desire: "I can hardly 
tell what is meant by desiring an object except reading it as supplying a 
defect in our present consciousness; and I do not see how we can think 
of the supplying of such a defect without a feeling of gratification in the 
thought of it. . . . So far from seeking to controvert his [Ehrenfels'] 
position, I would only suggest whether it is not tautological. ' ' 

35 At the beginning of the article from which I have been quoting 
Dewey seeks to avoid a discussion of value as such by announcing that 
his interest is in valuation, not in the nature of value. But in the later 
form of the article in Essays in Experimental Logic this announcement is 
omitted. 



DEWEY'S PRAGMATIC THEORY OF VALUATION 219 

loving and cherishing would be to offer a solution to the problem 
of value ; so that he certainly admits that value in the sense in 
which we have defined it, and which he seems to think irrelevant, 
is the very matter that he is investigating. The "reason" in 
question, however, he seeks in a study of what he calls valuation 
as distinguished from any such merely affective-motor attitudes 
as loving or cherishing. For valuation is, according to Dewey, 
not a mere repetition of anything, but the actual instituting of 
a value by a process of judgment. ' ' To judge value is to engage 
in instituting a determinate value where none is given" (p. 516). 

Before proceeding to give an account of this judging process 
which institutes determinate values, it seems to me best to indi- 
cate at once where, in Dewey's theory of practical judgments, 
value as defined by Dewey comes in, and where, in Dewey's 
theory, value as defined in our definition comes in. For, after 
all, Dewey does admit two kinds of value. "Value," he says, 
"has two meanings, to prize and to appraise, to esteem and to 
estimate" (p. 520). Obviously, our definition in terms of in- 
terest fits the former of either of these pairs of alternatives, 
and this is the aspect of value that does not interest Dewey in 
his present investigation. 

This sort of value is found according to Dewey at the be- 
ginning of any particular situation ; it is a datum or series of 
data; it is what we start with when we are going to make a 
judgment. The value that Dewey is interested in is to be found 
later on in the process; it is as he sees it actually constituted 
by the judging activity. It is in a special sense the object of 
the judgment itself. And this being constituted by judgment, 
this practical creation of a logical activity, is the definition of 
value. It is then, in Dewey's theory, not very significant to say 
whether value is subjective or objective ; but it is significant to 
say whether value is practical. Value is the outcome of logical 
activity in a particular situation demanding action, and this 
particular form of logical activity is what Dewey calls in general 
a judgment of practice. 



220 A STUDY IN THE TEEOEY OF VALVE 

In case Dewey is right the definition which we are defending 
in the present chapter is not to be denied as false, but discarded 
as irrelevant, as defining a datum present in all cases where 
the significant valuation process goes on to institute a determi- 
nate value in the significant and clarifying sense of the word. 
But in case we are right in proceeding on the basis of the defi- 
nition which we are at present upholding, we should expect by 
analysis to reduce all the values that Dewey discovers as consti- 
tuted by "valuation" (which is one type of judgment of prac- 
tice) to values in terms of our definition.^" 

Let me now try to make Dewey's position a little clearer. 
I have said that for Dewey values are instituted in a process 
called valuation or judgment of value, a type of judgment sub- 
sumed under the more general heading judgments of practice. 
Dewey considers judgments of practice a special form of judg- 
ment distinguished by its expression in propositions which have 
a special type of subject matter. A judgment of practice is 
always made in a situation demanding action. It takes the form, 
A should do so-and-so. It is advisable, expedient, well, better, 
best, for A to do so-and-so. It is a judgment of agendum, some- 
thing to be done ; it is a judgment, as he says, "to treat a given 
subject matter in a particular way" (p. 506). His view is that 
such judgments deserve special treatment and a special name, 
because neglect of such special treatment has brought about 
much confusion, especially in the ease of moral judgments of 
value (pp. 506, 514). The special characteristics of the judg- 
ment of practice are the special characteristics of the subject 
matter of the propositions in which such judgments are ren- 
dered.^" This subject matter implies an objectively incomplete 
situation which is to be completed, and this not indifferently but 



36 Professor Perry does this in his article, Dewey and Urban on Value 
Judgments, in the Jour, of Phil. Psychol, and Sci. Methods, vol. 14, p. 169. 

3" The confusion introduced by this sort of characterization of judg- 
ments by means of the wording of the expression of the judgment instead 
of the intent of the judgment is exhibited and criticized in Professor 
Perry 's article above referred to. 



DEWEY'S PBAGMATIC THEOBY OF VALUATION 22] 

in the better way, a situation in which the judgment itself is a 
factor in tliis better way of completion. Clearly, if the subject 
TaattcT implies that the situation should be completed in a given 
way, it also implies at least that the given situation admits of 
such completion. ^^ Furthermore, such a judgment is hypothet- 
ical in the sense that only if all the relevant data have been 
considered will the judgment be correct. And it will thus re- 
main for the determined-upon action which completes the situ- 
ation to show the truth or falsity of the judgment. 

To say, then, that a judgment of value is a judgment of 
practice is to say, in Dewey's own words (1) "that the judg- 
ment of value is never complete in itself, but always in behalf 
of determining what is to be done"; and (2) that "jiidgments 
of value (as distinct from the direct experience of something 
as good) imply that value is not anything as yet given, but is 
something to-be-given by future action, itself conditioned upon 
(varying with) the judgment" (p. 514). One of the impli- 
cations, then, of subsuming judgments of value under judgments 
of practice is, in Dewey's own words, an implication as to the 
nature of value, viz., that value is always "something to-be- 
given by future action, ' ' something ' ' conditioned upon the judg- 
ment. ' ' 

This account is not very clear, but its meaning is not very 
hard to see in a concrete instance such as the one Dewey gives, 
namely, the situation in which I choose a suit of clothes, put 
upon one suit, that is, a value higher than upon the others 
offered, or rather upon getting one particular suit a value higher 
than upon doing something else to complete the situation. This 
situation offers such data as my knowledge about suits in general, 
my particular wants just now, the purchasing power at my im- 
mediate disposal, the various qualities of the various suits, and 
the combinations of these to be had in any one suit, etc. The 



38 The practical judgment is thus an imperative, a moral imperative; 
but instead of being categorical like Kant's, it is, as explained below, a 
sort of hypothetical imperative. 



222 A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALUE 

value-judgment to be rendered might well be expressed in the 
form, I ought to get suit X, or, It is on the whole advisable to 
get suit X, or, In the circumstances I value the getting of suit 
X more highly than doing anything else to complete the situ- 
ation. 

Obviously this is very different from saying that I like X 
better than any other suit, or that suit X is the highest priced 
suit, or that X is the best bargain ; for I may be choosing a low 
priced suit, and circumstances may require a dark shade, which 
I dislike, and so on. The valuation or act of value- judgment 
consists in my filling out the situation by pronouncing the judg- 
ment in question ; and in so doing I institute a determinate value, 
I name X as that suit best fitted for my needs and most satis- 
factory, as far as my knowledge goes. If it turns out, when I 
come to wear the suit, that it has no watch pocket, or that 
another suit would have fitted my purposes better, or that the 
same suit could have been had at a bargain the next day, then 
the judgment, X is the right suit to buy, has turned out false. 
It was really a hypothetical judgment with a suppressed condi- 
tion : // I have considered everything that is to be considered, 
then X is the best suit to buy ; if I am valuing correctly, then 
the getting of X has for me in the circumstances greater value 
than getting any other of the suits. 

If we follow this, it appears that the truth of the value- 
judgment depends upon its outcome in later action and that 
the value is not subjective, for it is determined in the end prac- 
tically. I institute a determinative value when I pronounce the 
judgment that X is the right suit to buy; but the truth of the 
judgment, and consequently the validity of the value instituted 
by this judgment, depend upon later action and later circum- 
stances. Value is in this sense objective ; but the significant fact 
is that value is practical, i.e., the object of a practical judgment 
and determined in judgment. Value may thus be either valid 
or not according as the judgment turns out true or false. And 



DEWEY'S PBAGMATIC THEORY OF VALUATION 223 

this is clearly an entirely different sort of value from the value 
of our definition in terms of interest. 

It may very well be that I have not given Dewey's view 
adequately; but aside from the fact that the view is difficult 
and that the whole of his own article scarcely makes it clear 
there is the further fact that it contains confusions of thought, 
or at least that as far as I can make out it contains confusions 
of thought ; and that until these have been clearly exhibited 
one can hardly expect to grasp the theory completely. As I 
see it, these confusions arise in the main as follows : 

Dewey speaks definitely of the judgment as being incomplete 
as judgment until the act is accomplished which is the real object 
of the judgment (p. 522). In other words, I have not finished 
judging that I ought to get suit X until I have got suit X. This 
seems to me to confuse a logical process with a succeeding set 
of motor-activities. It seems to me that there clearly is a point 
in time at which the judgment is complete, and after which the 
getting of the suit occurs. If this seems to present the difficulty 
of a judgment the object of which does not yet exist, the way out 
is to revise one's theory of judgment so as to include such very 
frequent examples of judging activity as those which refer to 
objects either spatially or temporally removed.^'' 

There is also a confusion involved in making the judgment 
depend upon the outcome for its truth. It would seem to be the 
case on any but a pragmatic theory of truth, that a judgment 
is either false or true as it stands when it is made. When we 
decide to act, it is true, I suppose, that we are usually sup- 
pressing some such condition as, if my judgment is right, or 
if I fully know what I am talking about and deciding on, then 
1 should act so-and-so. In this case the so-called judgment of 
practice is an ordinary hypothetical judgment ; and it will follow 
that, when circumstances occur to show that I should not have 
acted as I did, it will likewise be shown that my judgment that 



39 Professor Perry 's article above referred to briefly suggests such a 
theory of judgment. 



224 A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALUE 

I should SO act as I did ivas wrong. My hypothetical judgment, 
however, stands good. It simply happens that the consequent 
is denied by circumstances. But my not knowing at the time 
when I acted whether my judgment was true or false does not 
show that the judgment itself was neither true nor false at the 
time when it was made. Again, it is not a difficulty in the 
situation but a difficulty in a theory of judgment that is revealed 
here. 

What, then, are we to say of value as instituted by judg- 
ment? Is the value of getting suit X actually determined by 
judging that X is the right suit to get ? From what I have just 
said, this would seem clearly not to be the case. As the j\idg- 
ment is complete when it is pronounced, regardless of our knowl- 
edge as to its truth or falsity, so the suit either has the value 
we attribute to it in judgment or it has not. And whether it 
has or has not depends precisely on its relation to our demands, 
our likings or dislikings. It is true that our getting the suit 
has value as well as the suit itself ; but these are merely two 
different values, one of which depends on our attitude towards 
getting a suit, the other upon our attitude towards the suit 
itself. 

Dewey tries to avoid value as anotlier name for loving, 
cherishing, etc., but it turns out that just this definition of 
value satisfies all the conditions of his description of valuation, 
and that the sort of value that he defines as determined in 
jixdgment or as constituted by judgment or more directly still 
as value-in-judgment reveals itself as merely another value of 
the sort defined in terms of interest. 

It is perhaps worth while summarizing both the view pre- 
sented in this chapter and the chief objections that I have urged 
against it. 



DEWEY'S PRAGMATIC THEORY OF VALUATION 225 



SUMMAKY OF DeWEY 'S POSITION 

1. Dewey sees the distinction made between motor-aff^eetive 
attitudes and cognitive judgment. 

2. He admits a use of the word valice in the sense of that 
which is liked or disliked. 

3. He discards this sort of value, which he calls the "good 
of immediate behaviour,"*" as being unimportant and not the 
matter of the genuine judgment of value, and substitutes as the 
significant sort of value that which he calls the ' ' good of reason. ' ' 

4. This good of reason, he says, is instituted by a logical 
process called valuation or value-judgment; and value is thus 
to be tested for its validity in a way analogous to that in which 
the truth of any judgment is to be tested. 

5. The process of valuation is thus active in creating, is a 
factor in creating, its own subject matter, and in this way is 
paradoxical, for the judgment as such is not complete until the 
act is accomplished. 

6. But it remains that value is the result of such a para- 
doxical logical process called valuation, and that the good of 
reason is the real matter of the genuine judgment of value, not 
a judgment merely about goods and bads, but a judgnjent which 
creates a determinate value, which institutes a good. 

Summary of Criticism 

1. The theory of Dewey, in making value, even in the sense 
of value as judged, or in the sense of the good of reason instead 
of the good of behaviour, a creation of judgment or valuation, 
makes the validity of the value or the test of the value as such 
the same as the validity or the test of truth of the judgment. 
As a theory of a particular sort of judgments called value- 
judgments, then, this theory of valuation is open to the same 
criticism as the pragmatic theory of truth. It identifies the 
truth of a judgment with the subject's knowledge of that truth, 
and so finds this truth in the future workings of the idea, in the 
success or failure of the activity following the making of the 
judgment. 

2. The paradoxical nature of the valuation process, which 
creates its own siibject matter (a part of itself), which is its 
own subject matter, depends upon failing to analyse the situ- 
ation completely. Analysis shows that what the judgment creates 



40 Essays in Experimental Logic, p. 358, footnote. 



226 A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALUE 

is not its own subject matter, that the judgment is not about 
itself, but about something outside itself. It may be a hypo- 
thetical judgment; but a hypothetical judgment does not consti- 
tute a paradox. 

3. The values created by valuation, which Dewey exhibits 
as radically different from mere goods of behaviour, turn out 
to be in all cases instances of value as defined in terms of interest. 
My valuing the rain or the raining positively, as a force or a 
factor in a situation, is as truly my liking the rain or liking it 
to rain, as my valuing the rain negatively (as disagreeably wet) 
is my disliking the wetting I get. The one valuing only happens 
after I have found by means involving intellectual processes how 
valuable the rain is ; but my valuing it, as a result of my infor- 
mation, is entirely distinct from that information or from any 
judgments I may have made in acquiring the information. It 
is thus the same confusion that Dewey so specifically warns 
against that he himself mal?;es, namely, that between motor- 
affective attitudes and cognitive judgment. The only difference 
is one of temporal sequence. The confusion he cleared up was 
that resulting from a neglecting of the difference between motor- 
affective experience itself and the subsequent judgment that 
something was a good. The confusion he falls into results from 
failing to distinguish between the making of a series of judg- 
ments concerning goods and the subsequent complexly built-up 
motor-affective attitude towards, or experience of, good things. 



CHAPTER V 

THE IDEALISTIC CRITICISM 

Our definition of value, derived from the empirical obser- 
vation of psychologists, seems quite satisfactorily to stand the 
light, or emerge from the darkness, of the pragmatic view, which 
would have it that value is instituted in judgment, that value- 
in-judgment is what we mean by value when we use the word 
significantly. Value-judgment or valuation would in this prag- 
matic view be the primary object of investigation in a theory 
of value. Now we can admit that valuing often depends on 
having made judgments of various degrees of complexity. But 
we have so far succeeded in maintaining that, when we find 
value attributed, this attribution, even in the form of a judg- 
ment, simply means that between the object valued and the sub- 
ject valuing this object, there is, before the judgment is made 
or can be made, the relation called, somewhat loosely and gen- 
erally, liking, on the one hand, and heifig liked on the other. 
The being liked, or disliked, of the object is its value. And 
since this being liked, or disliked, is being the object of a motor- 
affective attitude in a subject, some sort of a subject is always 
requisite to there being value at all — not necessarily a judging 
subject, but a subject capable of at least motor-affective response. 
For the cat the cream has value, or better and more simply, the 
eat values the cream, or the warmth, or having her back scratched, 
quite regardless of her probable inability to conceive cream or 
to make judgments concerning warmth. 

Our next difficulty is to meet a criticism which characteris- 
tically announces itself as the outcome of a more fundamental, 
a more profound, view of the whole matter of value and value 
theory. This is the idealistic criticism of our definition. It 



228 A STUDY IN THE THEOBY OF VALUE 

has many forms; but while they all point to what our definition 
as such does not accomplish, they seem to me to offer this sug- 
gestion of what is so far lacking in our account of value, on the 
basis of a confusing definition of value, which we can not accept. 
My point, then, is that idealistic theories of value mistake the 
nature of value, but that the idealistic emphasis upon the re- 
lation of value to judgment and more especially the relations of 
values to each other, points to a phase of value theory which is 
very important, a phase which I wish to discuss in the next 
chapter of this essay. 

The great difficulty, as I see it, of examining the idealistic 
point of view lies in the fact that this view, instead of meeting 
facts and accepting phenomena as they present themselves, such 
for example as the fact that I like apples or the phenomenon of 
my liking apples, or that the cat likes the cream or the cat's 
liking the cream — that this idealistic view holds that such facts 
and such phenomena are not the real heart of any matter. Be- 
fore the idealist meets arguments or discusses theories based 
upon regarding facts and phenomena he turns his opponent's 
or his disciple 's attention to what he calls the more fundamental 
matters of knowledge of facts and knowledge of, or acquaintance 
with phenomena; and then, by the formulation of what appears 
to be an insuperable difficulty, shows that what we started with 
as palpable facts or empirically evident phenomena are elabor- 
ate constructions, to be understood only by overcoming the insup- 
erable difficulty which he has formulated, in other words by 
coming to understand the ways of a knowing mind. That is, 
he introduces the epistemological considerations of idealistic 
epistemology. 

Epistemology is based, however, upon reasoning, and the 
idealist 's reasoning always, as a matter of fact, begins with and 
depends upon facts and phenomena. For by his own admission 
he means something by what he says, and this that he means is 
something beyond the saying or the thinking ; it is precisely 
that which the thinking or saying means, either that which it 



THE IDEALISTIC CRITICISM 229 

asserts to be true of something or other, or that to which it has 
reference as somehow existing or being, that to which it points. 
What the idealist means need not be the simplest empirical facts 
or the most obviously existent physical things; what he means 
may be logical principles or the intricately related phenomena 
of mental life ; but phenomena or facts they are, and on clear 
analytical statement they turn out to be on the same plane as 
the phenomena and the facts which he refuses to let us take as 
directly usable data. 

A refutation of the theories of idealistic epistemology, or 
rather a discrediting of the point of view of idealistic epistem- 
ology, is not, however, within the scope of this essay. More- 
over, the essentials of such a refutation have been pointed out 
by several contemporary critics of idealism.*^ But if our defi- 
nition is to stand in the face of the general idealistic criticism 
of psychological theories of value or of an empirically derived 
definition of value, and if it is to escape this criticism on the 
above indicated grounds I must at the very least analyse an 
example of such criticism and show that it rests on an empirical 
basis, and so on no deeper dug or better laid foundations than 
empirical observation. 

I shall try to do this with Bosanquet's theory of value as 
expounded in his Individuality and Value. Bosanquet certainly 
makes the chief contention of idealism in general as to the 
nature of reality and the nature of value, and his argument has 
the advantage, for our present purpose, of being contemporary 
and sophisticated, and of being formulated expressly to meet 
other theories of value including those in terms, as he says, of 
finite conation — theories of value based on such a definition as 
ours. 

It will be objected, perhaps, that Bosanquet does not ade- 
quately represent any but his own very special point of view. 
This, however, might be said, I think, of any philosopher, and 



*i E.g., E. B. Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies; F. J. E. Wood- 
bridge, The Problem of Consciousness, in Studies, etc., by pupils of C. E. 
Garman; John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy. 



230 A STUDY IN THE TEEOEY OF VALUE 

yet it still remains the fact that we speak of realistic and prag- 
matic and naturalistic doctrines as such. Our so speaking seems 
to me merely an indication, perhaps, but an indication Avliieh 
can be followed to something real which it indicates, namely, a 
genuine agreement on a few central themes or fundamental prin- 
ciples. After all, all the forms of modern idealism have that 
in common by virtue of which they are classed as idealistic. 
They all treat of a dichotomy which they attempt to reduce to 
unity ; the knowing process or subject on one side, the object 
of knowledge on the other. The characteristic of reality for 
idealism is thus always in some way or other its being known, 
and the knowledge relation becomes all-important. In the end 
the unity is established by some embracing of the known by a 
knower, and this happens only by virtue of the fact that the 
known is shown to partake essentially of the nature of knowing, 
whether this nature be conative or not. Thus any idealistic 
theory of value would be apt to agree that value is somehow 
known, and that this being known involves that value somehow 
partake of a logical nature — logical meaning here merely of the 
nature of thought as siich, whether thought itself be of the will 
or whether it be some purer intellectual principle or activity. 

It is further characteristic of modern idealism that value, 
in being constituted somehow by thought, does not thus become i- 
subjective, that is, depending upon or existing in any particular 
finite individual ; but remains objective. Objective, however, 
instead of meaning what common sense is apt to mean by it, 
that is, simply independent of any particular individual, means 
this and more. To be objective means to an idealist to be inde- 
pendent of individuals who think, but at the same time to be 
dependent upon the necessary ways of thinking, to be dependent 
upon thought in a more "fundamental" way. As it seems to 
me, this is also in a less intelligible way, if not in an altogether 
obscure or even mystical sense of the word thought. In some 
forms of idealism, indeed, thought may be written with a capital 



TEE IDEALISTIC CBITICISM 231 

T, and thought becomes in this case not only the thinking but 
the Thinker and the Thing Thought in its fullest reality, its 
deepest meaning. 

But at any rate I think it may be fairly said that idealistic 
theories of value, if they are to be classed as idealistic at all, 
assert that values are of the nature of thought, and that, on the 
other hand, this does not make them subjective but leaves them 
objective. If objective here is to be interpreted in a special 
sense, this sense is, according to the idealist, the necessary mean- 
ing of the word objective, which itself is not understood rightly 
except in terms of an idealistic epistemology. 

From the point of view of our definition of value idealism 
thus goes too far. Instead of making value subjective in the 
sense of being constituted in a relation, as was explained above, 
between a valuing subject and a valued object, it makes value 
the creation of a subject which somehow transcends the indi- 
vidual subject ; and, further, it agrees with the pragmatists in 
asserting that value is logical in its nature in some special sense 
of the word logical. That is, in making value objective, idealism 
would seem, if we are right, to make much the same confusion 
as that which we found in the pragmatic conception of value, 
as determined in judgment and as being a sort of correlate of 
a logical activity, instead of being, as we have been saying that 
it is, that which satisfies an interest, a correlate, so to speak, of 
motor-affective response. Idealistic value theory would make 
value other than subjective ; but the kind of objectivity that it 
would give to value is very much the kind that it gives to truth ; 
and it would at least seem that in doing this it is failing to keep 
clear the distinction between cognitive judgment and motor- 
affective attitude. 

Our criticism, in the light of our definition, would thus find 
two mistakes here, but it would also find one important sug- 
gestion. The first mistake is the assertion of the objectivity of 
value. The second mistake is making the nature of value logical. 



232 A STUDY IN THE TEEOBT OF VALUE 

But the very recurrence of this confusion in such different 
theories as pragmatism and idealism indicates that a theory of 
value must define not only value itself but the relation of value 
to judgment, and, through judgments of value, the relation of 
kinds of value to each other. This is the suggestion. In the 
present chapter we are to find these two mistakes and this sug- 
gestion in Bosanquet's theory of value and his criticism of our 
definition of value in terms of interest as these are given in 
The Principle of Individuality and Value. But at the very 
beginning we are forced to take into account Bosanquet's more 
general theory of nature and mind, to get the setting of his 
argument and really see the point that he is making. He is 
always working with the idea, which he maintains- throughout, 
"that the universe is one, and each finite mind a factor in the 
effort which sustains its unity. "*^ For him the essential nature 
of this whole is what he calls "creative logic," "which consti- 
tutes experience and is appreciable in so far as experience has 
value. "''^ There is thus genuine continuity in experience and 
in reality.** But there is also a genuinely external Nature ;*° 
Nature is definitely not of our making. In fact only "at a 
relatively high level" does finite consciousness make its appear- 
ance, "focussing and revealing the significance of a huge com- 
plication of mute history and circumstance behind it and sur- 
rounding it,"*® and the "bodily arrangements and mechanism 
are at least the basis of the workings of the soul."" "The con- 
scious . . . self is on the top of, it is made possible by, all the 
stress and complexity of the work that goes before it."*^ It is 
the "climax ... of evolution."*'^ 



*2 The Value and Destiny of the Individual, p. 103. 

43 The Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 122. 

** The Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 98. ' ' Our attitude is 
that the principle of life and reality is one throughout, and is the prin- 
ciple of individuality, and that this can be traced in all forms of exper- 
ience, none of which are to be taken as superseding or as discontinuous 
with each other." 

*5 IMd., p. 135. "There must be a bona fide nature." 

ielMd., p. 154. isibid., pp. 157-158. 

47 Ihid., p. 158. 49 Ibid., p. 158. 



TEE IDEALISTIC CBITICISM 233 

Obviously Bosanquet is not entirely at one with all idealists, 
but it is equally obvious from other statements that his position 
is essentially idealistic: "I do not," he says, "doubt that any- 
thing which can ultimately he, must be of the nature of mind or 
experience, and, therefore, that reality must ultimately be con- 
ceived after this manner."^" And he applies this to values: 
"Relation to consciousness, presence in an experience, is no 
doubt the sine qua non of all values. But this does not forbid 
a comparison of our experience of external objects . . . with our 
experience of our conscious acts. "^^ "Matter is externality, a 
side of our experience which seems essential to the whole of 
'things, but not capable of independent reality. "^^ "After all, 
the apparent dualism between matter and consciousness is an 
arrangement which falls within consciousness; though we hold 
it only fair play to disregard this general sine qua non when we 
are studying and comparing the detailed content of experi- 
ence. "°^ 

I have given all these quotations to indicate that both in 
his view of reality and in his view of value Bosanquet is typically 
an idealist. He regards all reality and all value as relation to 
consciousness or presence in consciousness. But he also admits 
that we must disregard this sine qua non when we are studying 
the detailed content of experience. Thus his position so far as 
it is given in these quotations leaves it open to him to make 
value as objective as anything could be. In other words, for 
him his assertion that for all values some relation to consciousness 
is a necessary condition, no more makes values subjective than it 
makes anything real subjective. Nature itself, if it is to be 
ultimately real, must be of the nature of mind. But nature is 
genuinely external, he says ; so that for a detailed study of ex- 
perience this sine qua non of all reality, namely, its relation to 
consciousness, may be disregarded. Now not all idealists would 



so The Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 135. 

51 TJie Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 149, footnote. 

52lhid., p. 194. 

5ilhid., p. 211. 



234 A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALVE 

admit this theoretically. But at least their real procedure, if 
it is to lead anywhere, must make distinctions ivithin experience, 
and since all experience is for them in some sense mental or 
even conscious, the conscious nature of all reality can hardly be 
called a clarifying or enlightening or relevant consideration. 
We are left with just the same questions as we had without this 
consideration, and among these is the question as to the nature 
of value. 

This seems to me a fair answer to the general idealistic 
position which insists upon the objectivity of value, but which 
makes value nevertheless of the nature of thought. This position 
amounts merely to asserting that values are real or objective just 
as reality is real, i.e., in that respect in which all that is real is so, 
in being of the nature of consciousness. This also makes good the 
criticism I suggested above that, after all, when the idealist tells 
us anything definite about things, he really begins just where 
every one begins, with data on the one hand and logical principles 
on the other, both of these being independent of himself and 
his consciousness, but being present to him of course in con- 
sciousness, i.e., by virtue of the fact that he consciously responds 
to phenomena and facts in the ways in which a rational being 
must respond by virtue of the peculiarities of his organic struc- 
ture, and, if it is adding anything further to say so, by virtue 
of the logical principles according to which his mind works. 

But this abstract rejection of the idealistic point of view 
becomes more convincing and more inevitable in view of a con- 
crete embodiment of the position in an argument. Let us take 
Bosanquet's actual procedure. We have seen that he admits 
that in actual detailed discussion of experience we must dis- 
regard the general underlying nature of all experience, as being 
unimportant, and turn to the actual differences and likenesses 
that we find — the relations of parts of experience to each other, 
as these relations are exhibited to us when we bring the intellect 
to bear upon experience in detail. 



TEE IDEALISTIC CBITICISM 235 

In the first place, we must select, for a theory of value, the 
particular facts and phenomena that are relevant to the matter. 
Bosanquet chooses what he calls the more adequate human ex- 
periences ; life at its highest, not at its lowest, is to furnish his 
data. He announces this over and over again. In Lecture I 
of The Pnnciple of Individuality we are to "begin ... with 
the principle that in our attitude to experience, or through ex- 
perience to our world, we are ... to take for our standard what 
man recognizes as value when his life is fullest and his soul at 
its highest stretch. "°^ The "necessary minima of experience 
. . . are merely starting-points from which experience devel- 
ops."^' "If all value is in individuality, then we must start 
from the fullest experience of it we can construct. "°® "The 
higher experiences are the clue to true individuality and to the 
mode of inclusion of the lower. "^^ And more particularly it is 
the esthetic experience that he seems to have in mind most often 
when he is arguing upon the nature of the whole — the criterion 
of value that he establishes. "It is obvious that if we take an 
idea of the individual from what he is at the minimum of his 
conscious being, . . . we shall get a wholly different reading of 
his nature from that which will suggest itself if we take into 
account the social aesthetic or religious consciousness and their 
characteristic or their highest development."'^ And more par- 
ticularly : ' ' "We may take as an example a work of art ... In 
its essence ... it is self-contained and a true whole, possessing 
significance in itself, and not driving our thought beyond it to 
a detached meaning and explanation."'® "Revolting from 
Mechanism we should go ... to Art" (to find the true nature 
of reality).'^" To grasp the logical nature of self -transcendence 
we are to "think of the attitude demanded ... by a master- 
piece of art."*^^ It is "when for a moment Shakespeare or 



iilbid., p. 3. osiud., pp. 269-270. 

55 Ibid., p. 296. 53 ihid., pp. 57-58. 

56 Ibid., p. 308. eolMd., p. 78. 
5T Ibid., p. XA'iii. 61 Ibid., p. 260. 



236 A STUDY IN THE THEOEY OF VALUE 

Beethoven has laid his spell upon yon" that "you scarcely recog- 
nise yourself.""^ 

These are the data we start with. "We must also, of course, 
formulate the situation logically, if we are to treat it logically ; 
and it is in this formulation that Bosanquet throws most light 
on the question of value, although, as it seems to me, the result 
is in the end the same appeal to the conscious nature of all 
reality and all value, or, as Bosanquet calls it here, the logical 
nature of reality and value. In other words, if Bosanquet can 
be said to succeed in exhibiting the logical nature of value and 
valuing, this is done at the expense of leaving value and valuing 
undistinguished from the rest of real experience; and from the 
point of view of any one seeking light as to just what distin- 
guishes value, what sets off this concept as unique, such a result 
seems to me of no particular use. On the other hand, as I have 
said several times above, this theory of Bosanquet, in insisting 
upon the logical nature of value and valuing, is insisting upon 
relating parts of experience to each other. And if there is a 
danger in this mode of procedure of omitting the very distinc- 
tions Ave are seeking, still an emphasis on relations as holding 
things together is not to be entirely neglected simply because 
we are also interested in distinguishing related matters from 
each other. Bosanquet and the idealists seem to me to go much 
too far, so far as almost to make their theories meaningless ; but, 
on the other hand, there is no doubt a danger of too completely 
missing the fact that experiences are intimately connected with 
each other, and that therefore the truth about any situation 
must include this relatedness as a unifying principle as well as 
exhibit the distinctions which set off one fact or phenomenon or 
one set of facts or phenomena from another. 

For Bosanquet, then, the point is to meet the theory that 
makes of value nothing but a name for that which is desired 
or that which is finitely purposed or that which is the fulfillment 



62 The Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 260. 



TB.E IDEALISTIC CEITICISM. 237 

of interest, by an argument which, substituting the idea of per- 
fection or satisfaetoriness for that of the end of a conative 
process, the satiety of a finite consciousness, finds that value is 
to be judged by a logical criterion, that value is prior to desire, 
that there is an inevitable logic of values. Values according 
to Bosanquet are thus objective in the sense that objects of 
likings and dislikings possess as much of value as of "trueness," 
i.e., that values can be logically criticized, and that they are 
thus established in a realm where a definition in terms of what 
he calls a non-rational immediacy, the bare fact of the existence 
of a particular state of a finite mind (i.e., a particular feeling 
or desire) is irrelevant. 

Bosanquet 's formulation of the problem of value takes the 
form of a question. Can ultimate values be argued onf An 
affirmative answer to this question, according to him, puts values 
into the realm of reason, makes them absolute in whatever sense 
truth is absolute, and subjects judgments concerning them to a 
logic just as rigorous as the canons by which we judge of the 
truth of propositions. Value, like truth, thus comes to be a 
matter of "implication in reality," and our expressions of value 
in the form of judgments of value are to be criticized on the 
principle which he calls that of relevance, of consistency with 
the whole universe of reality so far as we know it, of capacity 
to be included in the whole, his principle of positive non-contra- 
diction. Nor is this equivalent to asserting that value is a matter 
of "formal" logic, a matter of mere consistency with a set of 
premisses, or principles, or postulates. It is saying that value 
is as objective as truth itself, that it is in fact a kind of truth; 
and truth is that which can meet the positive principle of non- 
contradiction ; that is true which has the capacity to go on 
existing in the real world not only heside the rest of reality but 
as fully organic to the rest of reality in such sense that negation 
or denial of it involves the negation or denial of the whole world, 
its particular self included. 



238 A STUDY IN THE THEOBY OF VALUE 

Unfortunately Bosanquet's formulation includes the word 
ultimate; but after all, his argument itself takes up and meets 
our definition of value in terms of interest without seriously 
modifying this definition. Moreover, an examination of his 
criticism of this definition will, I think, not be prejudiced by 
neglecting his introduction of the word ultimate. He is so sure 
that any significant study of the matter in hand must turn on 
the nature of ultimate value that he will not discuss the question 
without introducing the word. If it does not mean very much 
to a more empirically minded inquirer, the latter may still follow 
the argument with the one reservation that this term is not clear, 
and in the end accept only so much of the criticism as really is 
clear. In the present case it turns out that the argument is 
little modified so far as it concerns us by the introduction of 
this word, although the word is apt to occur every now and 
then as if it were an accepted modification of the term value 
whenever the term value is significantly used. With this note 
of caution we may proceed to outline the critical argument, the 
purpose of which is to destroy our definition in much the sense 
in which the pragmatic argument was to accomplish this same 
task, namely, by showing how trivial and essentially insignificant 
the concept value becomes if it be defined in terms of interest. 

The first point in Bosanquet's attack does not affect our 
definition seriously, for it is directed against a statement which 
our definition does not require us to make, namely, the statement 
that values can not be argued on. Bosanquet has put the ques- 
tion, Ca7i values be argued onf And his answer is to be, Yes, 
they can, and they are therefore logical. Now our definition 
denies only the second part of this assertion. We agree that 
values can be argued on ; but we do not see that being capable 
of being argued on implies being of a logical nature. It will, 
however, be simpler to get at our disagreement on this second 
point, i.e., as to whether or not values are logical, by seeing first 
in what sense Bosanquet means to assert that values can be 



THE IDEALISTIC CRITICISM 239 

argued on, and then how he concludes from this that they are 
logical. 

The assertion that judgments of value are not amenable to 
reason seems to have various meanings, says Bosanquet, sug- 
gesting various partial truths. By judgments of value here 
Bosanquet means the pronouncing that something is valuable; 
hence for him to say that judgments of value are not amenable 
to reason is equivalent to answering his question. Can values he 
argued onf in the negative. His first point is to show that, if 
this negative answer means that a judgment is self-identical, 
i.e., that no reasoning will make a particular judgment A into 
anything but itself, it is a valid statement. But he wishes also 
to show that in this case it is not a significant answer to tlie 
question, Can judgments of value he argued onf or Are judg- 
ments of value amenahle to reason? He is not trying to show 
that the judgment A is something other than A. When we 
assert that a judgment can be modified by argument we do not 
mean, for instance, that the judgment of a child that 7 X ^ = 4'-! 
is anything but just this erroneous judgment. We do mean, 
however, that the child, in so far as it is a rational being, can 
be shown that its judgment 7X6:^43 is false, and that 
7 X 6 = 42, not contingently but necessarily. In other words, 
7 X 6:^42 is a statement about the real nature of the universe 
we live in, and to deny that 7 X 6 = 42 is not to attempt to 
answer the reasoning or opinion of a teacher, but to deny the 
whole world. The truth in this interpretation of the assertion 
that judgment can not be logically supported because it simply 
is what it is, by virtue of being immediately itself and nothing 
else, would seem to be that it is hard to change people's minds, 
a pretty well known fact, but one which suggests, after all, that 
it is the very nature of people's minds to get changed when the 
right attack is made upon false notions. 

So much for the first interpretation of the negative answer 
to the question. Can values he argued onf If this negative 



240 A STUDY IN THE THEOBY OF VALUE 

answer simply means that a judgment is self -identical ; if, for 
example, our saying that we can not argue about the goodness 
of a deed means simply that we can not at the same time both 
deny and assert that some one has judged the deed good, then 
Bosanquet agrees with us ; a judgment once made is just itself. 
The significant point is that when we argue about its correctness, 
we are not denying that the judgment was just what it was, 
correct or incorrect as it may have been. We are arguing simply 
to show that the judgment was either false or true, and to induce 
some one to make any further judgments on the same matter in 
the light of this exhibition of the truth or falsity in question. 

"What Bosanquet says here seems to me fairly unexception- 
able. If saying that values can not be argued on means that 
any particular judgment is identical with itself, then there is 
no use in denying the assertion. Moreover, saying that values 
can not be argued on, when you mean that any judgment is 
identical with itself, is certainly not much to the point in any 
investigation of the nature of value. The answer is simply irrel- 
evant, as Bosanquet shows. 

But this negative answer, i.e., that values can not be argued 
on, may mean, secondly, according to Bosanquet, that value- 
judgments are simply the registering of facts ; that, therefore, 
my liking this or that simply precedes any judgment that I like 
this or that. In other words, the valuable is that which is already 
liked or disliked. To argue upon the question is thus altogether 
gratuitous. The liking or disliking simply has existed ; the judg- 
ment is limited to being an assertion about this existence. The 
judgment may be either true or false, but argument can only 
call attention to the occurrence judged about ; it can not alter 
what happened. 

Now although this is not Avhat I should mean by saying that 
judgments could not be argued on, it is, nevertheless, as it seems 
to me, saying something very sensible. Bosanquet is in fact 
considering here exactly the sort of definition of value that has 



TEE IDEALISTIC CRITICISM 241 

been maintained so far in this essay. The definition of value 
in terms of interest makes value out to be just this fact of motor- 
affective life. "What is liked or disliked has value. A judgment 
of value would accordingly be an assertion about a liking or a 
disliking. Any object would be pronounced valuable in so far 
as there were directed towards it attitudes of liking or disliking. 
And Bosanquet appears at times to agree to this. He admits, 
at least, that before you can argue on value you must "have 
experience of what it is ... to care for something as having 
worth. ""^ But as discrediting this point of view he asserts on 
the one hand that ' ' the distinction between cognition and feeling 
or desire" is irrelevant,"* and on the other "that positive pleas- 
ure and all satisfaction" (which he identifies with value) . . . 
"depends on the character of logical stability of the whole in- 
herent in objects of desire,"*'^ i.e., not on motor-affective atti- 
tudes. This latter consideration, he says, ' ' prescribes the nature 
of the ultimate good or end, which is the supreme standard of 
value. "'^*' We have thus, omitting what in these two assertions 
does not directly bear on our definition, two points to consider. 
The first is the suggested irrelevance of the distinction between 
cognition and affective motor attitude, a point which we disposed 
of in Chapter IV, where this distinction was, I think, made out 
perfectly clearly. To me this distinction seems most relevant ; 
and with this relevance so well made out, it is hardly necessary 
to consider the objection of irrelevance. In fact what seems to 
me Bosanquet 's own confusion as to the nature of value is the 
result of a neglect of precisely this distinction. At any rate a 
charge of irrelevance must be made out in detail. There is no 
obligation on us to meet the mere charge as such, if we can 
reach by means of the distinction in question any clearer view 
of the nature of value. 



63 Tlie Principle of Individuality and Value, pp. 297-298. 

64 Op. cit., p. 294. 
63 Op. cit., p. 298. 
C6 Op. cit., p. 299. 



242 A STUDY IN THE TEEOBY OF VALUE 

The second point is more important. It amounts to saying 
not only that value resides in the object, but that it depends 
upon the inherence in the object of the character of logical 
stability of the whole. This certainly would impugn our defi- 
nition. For it views value as residing in the logical nature of 
the object, and certainly at first glance this is in utter disagree- 
ment with the idea that value is relational, subjective,^ the object 
being valuable just in so far as, and by virtue of the fact that, 
it enters into the relation to a subject, of being liked or disliked. ' 
As Bosanquet says, "the immediate fact of interest ... is at 
the opposite pole of experience from the ultimate or fundamental 
interest in which we find by consideration that all our power of 
earing would be adequately occupied. ""^^ 

But before we consider this criticism let me resume the 
argument up to this point. We have seen that Bosanquet puts 
the whole question as to the logical nature of value into the form. 
Can ultimate values he argued on? His own answer to the 
question is : Yes, values can be argued upon ; value judgments 
are amenable to logic ; values are themselves logical. It is only 
in the last statement that we can not, on the basis of our defi- 
nition in terms of interest, concur. Bosanquet 's argument con- 
siders two meanings of the directly negative answer to his ques- 
tion, i.e.. No, values can not be argued on. He shows the irrele- 
vance of this negative answer in case it merely means that judg- 
ments are self-identical. He then takes up what he considers 
a second meaning of this negative answer; and the statement 
of this second meaning is, as he gives it, an acceptable account 
of our definition of value in terms of interest, although as a 
matter of fact our definition is not meant to say that values can 
not be argued on. He makes two points here that concern our 
definition. First, he denies the relevance of our clear distinction 
between cognition and affective-motor experience, but without 
supporting this charge of irrelevance and without any invali- 
dating of the distinction which we have made. Secondly, he 



07 The Principle of Individuality and Value, pp. 296-297. 



TRE IDEALISTIC CRITICISM 243 

finds that value resides in the logical nature of the object, quite 
independently of the particular subject, and he finds, moreover, 
that the immediate fact of interest is at the opposite pole of 
experience from what he is considering, namely, this logical 
nature of the object which constitutes its value. 

His argument thus disposes of our definition much as Dewey's 
did. The "fact of interest" apparently has nothing to do with 
the question of value. But this position is not very difficult to 
meet. If the fact of interest has nothing to do with the case of 
value, then it at once appears that in considering those motor- 
affective attitudes in terms of which we defined value, w^e have not 
been talking about value at all. But this is scarcely in accord 
with Bosanquet's own statement that "before arguing upon 
questions of value, we must have immediate experience of what- 
is meant by caring for something. ' '^* Why, one naturally asks, 
should one need this experience of caring for things, if this 
caring for things, this fact of interest, has nothing to do with 
the matter in hand? But furthermore, I think it can be shown 
that this logical character of the whole which is inherent in 
the object itself and which constitutes its value turns out to be, 
on investigation, a confusing name for the relation of an object 
to a subject, a relation constituted by being liked or disliked. 
Bosanquet himself speaks of value as "felt perfection,'"^" and 
it is difficult to see how a felt logical perfection is much more 
than a name giving a specious objectivity and independence to 
Avhat is really the relation of an object to an interested subject. 
No doubt the nature of the object and the nature of the subject 
are requisite to the particular relations that arise between the 
two ; but it might very well remain clearly the case that the 
object does not have value excepting in so far as it comes into 
relation with the subject which is capable of liking it. Actual 
value then would imply the relation ; potential value would 
simply be the possibility of the relation. And when we come 



08 Op. cit., p. 296. 
69 Op. cit., p. 313. 



244 A STUDY IN THE THEOBY OF VALUE 

to take full account of Bosanquet's assertions as to the inherent 
logical stability of objects being their value, we find that this 
assertion, far from denying our definition of value in terms of 
interest, is simply a confusing or a particularly sophisticated 
statement of it. 

For let us see what Bosanquet means by this inherent logical 
stability, and where in experience we are to find it. It is best 
exemplified, as we saw in quotations from Bosanquet himself, 
in works of art. Esthetic appreciation and the objects of esthetic 
appreciation are, according to him, the best data for our study 
of the character of the whole, the logical stability or trueness 
of objects. It is when we listen to Beethoven that we experience 
the self -transcendence which is the ' ' nisus to reality, ' ' the ' ' spirit 
of logic." But when we appreciate a work of art fully, what 
happens is, according to our author, that the logic of the Abso- 
lute working in us finds itself in the work of art. We experience 
self-transcendence; the Absolute, which is coming to expression 
in us, finds more of itself in the work of art. In Fichtean terms, 
the Ego appropriates more of the Non Ego and in so doing 
becomes more fully itself. But these are dark sayings, and 
valuing, as we are familiar with it, is not an ineffable trance 
but a describable finite experience. We do actually value objects 
that are empirically present to us and we have even been able 
to say this in other words, to say in a more or less comprehensible 
and in an apparently simple sentence just what value is. Be- 
sides, Bosanquet himself admits that we never "come into pos- 
session of the perfect experience, "■^° that "the whole . . . can 
not be experienced as a whole by us. "^^ What, then, is this 
experiencing of the character of the whole inherent in objects? 
Obviously, in so far as it is an experience of the whole as such 
it is not in finite consciousness. But it is in just this particular, 
namely, in having the character of the inexperienceable whole, 
that the object is intrinsically and objectively valuable. Such 
value as this then that Bosanquet finds in the object itself we 



70 Op. cit., p. 273. 

71 Op. cit., p. 122. 



TEE IDEALISTIC CBITICISM 245 

evidently do not experience. What we are left with as data, 
as the actual finite experience of valuing, is precisely not any 
experience of the logical nature of the whole inherent in the 
object. In fact, so far as our experience is experience at all, 
so far as it is our experience of valuing, it does not consist in 
our grasping this logic inherent in the object. The most that 
can be said about our actual finite experience is that we feel 
the perfection of the object. But surely this is simply saying 
that even in the most adequate experience — in the sort of ex- 
perience that Bosanquet himself chooses for illustration, in ap- 
preciating a work of art — what we do in the ease of appreciating 
esthetically is to assume one sort of motor-affective attitude. We 
feel the perfection of the object ; we like it in just this sense. 
This liking depends on the character of the object no doubt ; 
but it also depends upon us; and until we like the object there 
is no actual value for us. ' Until so'me subject likes the object, 
the object has only potential value, and it has potential value 
only in so far as it is capable of being liked.' Bosanquet 's ob- 
jective, inherent, logical character seems to be either beyond the 
possibility of being experienced at all, or else to be simply one 
aspect of the relation between a subject and an object, the ob- 
ject's side of the relation, its being liked, or the characteristic 
by virtue of which it could be liked, should a subject come along 
and assume a motor-affective attitude towards it. The subject 
would not assume this attitude, of course, unless it were a cer- 
tain sort of subject, unless it had, in Bosanquet 's terms, a logical 
nature ; in our own terms, unless it possessed a particular sort 
of responsive mechanism. But the attitude remains motor- 
affective, and there is value present in the situation only so far 
as there is present the particular relation called interest. 

Bosanquet 's conclusion in his own words is as follows : "The 
question has been whether .the judgment of value can be logically 
supported, and whether the whole which has value lies in the 
sum of the values of conscious states ; ... we adhere to Plato 's 
conclusion that objects of our likings possess as much of satisfae- 



246 A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALUE 

toriness — which we identify with value — as they possess of reality 
or trueness. And this is a logical standard, and a standard in- 
volving the whole. "^^ 

We have seen that an agreement with Bosanquet on the point 
that values can be argued upon does not necessitate the giving 
up of our definition in terms of interest. We have further seen 
that, if objects may be said to possess as much of value as they do 
of trueness, then either this trueness is beyond our experiencing, 
or else it is another name for that aspect of the object which is 
its being liked by us. We like differently according as we are 
more or less complex and more or less normal responsive or- 
ganisms, and "trueness" in Bosanquet 's use of the word would 
only mean, so far as we are capable of feeling it, conformity of 
the object to our capabilities in the way of liking, the entering 
into the interest relation of the object in question, by our as- 
suming this attitude of response towards it. 

This seems to me to leave our definition intact and to answer 
the idealistic criticism of it. In so far as this criticism makes 
all experience alike in being of the nature of consciousness, it 
says nothing to distingush value phenomena from anything else. 
The objectivity it claims for value turns out to be a very special 
kind of objectivity, and, at least in Bosanquet 's argument, this 
inherent logical nature of the object, so far as it comes into 
experience at all, is simply one aspect of a relation which seems 
to be characterized much better by the terms liking and disliking 
or the term interest than by any terms suggesting cognitive or 
logical or specifically judgmental activity. The value, even for 
Bosanquet, is a satisfactoriness which is somehow felt,'^^ and 
both our own disagreement with him and our criticism of the 
pragmatic theory of valuation have been seriously lacking if 
they have not shown that the failure to maintain the clear dis- 
tinction between cognitive activity and motor-affective attitude 
introduces disastrous confusion. 



72 Op. cit., p. 317. 

73 Op. cit., p. 313. ..." value, i.e., felt perfection. ' ' 



THE IDEALISTIC CBIIICISM 247 

But to show that Bosanqiiet's criticism fails to discredit our 
definition of value and that his own description of value as 
inherent in the logic of the object, so far as it describes the 
finite experience of valuing, merely gives a misleading and 
specious objectivity to value, is not to deny that Bosanquet is 
right in holding that values can be argued on. In fact, it is 
my contention that values can be argued on, and that such 
argument is very important. In the next chapter I shall try 
to follow up the question of judgments of value in just that 
sense in which Bosanquet uses the phrase, and in so doing I 
hope to throw some light on the status of value itself and upon 
the relations of kinds of value to each other. In other words, 
I wish (1) to make clear the status of value itself in reality, 
showing how all values are alike, and (2) to show that there are 
different sorts of value, related to each other and dependent upon 
each other for their value-status. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE STATUS AND THE KINDS OF VALUE, AS IMPLIED 
IN JUDGMENTS OF VALUE 

The present chapter of this essay is to offer a brief account 
of two aspects of value which seem to me most important and 
most interesting. It is to show (1) that judgments concerning 
values of the most ordinarily acknowledged sorts imply the ex- 
istence or the reality of ethical and esthetic values, and (2) 
that these latter values have a status no less clearly definable 
nor less real than that of the former. Our definition has already 
more or less clearly exhibited the nature and status of value, 
but it will be necessary to make this status of value much clearer, 
to put it into a fuller context, to exhibit its application in the 
case of all values, in short to make out the second point indicated 
above, before we can make out the first, namely, the implication 
of "higher" values in judgments concerning "lower" ones. 

So far in this essay I have tried to demonstrate the intelli- 
gibility and adequacy of a definition of value in terms of interest. 
I have also proved, I think, that accepting this definition does 
not indicate any neglect of the work of the pragmatists, which 
is a theory of what they call valuation, and I think I have 
shown that accepting this definition does not indicate that one 
has not grasped the idealistic criticism of empirical or psycholog- 
ical notions of value. To hold such a definition is to recognize 
that the finite experience of valuing is an experience which neces- 
sarily calls into play motor-affective attitudes and not the cog- 
nitive activity of judgment. To hold such a definition is also 
to recognize that the presence of value always means the pres- 
ence of a relation of interest, and that what is often insisted 
upon as objective value is merely a name either for what is not 



THE STATUS AND TEE KINDS OF VALUE 249 

in any very clear sense objective, or for what simply is not in 
experience at all. This insistence upon objectivity may be an 
emphasis upon the object side of the relation between a valuing 
subject and that towards which its motor-affective attitude is 
directed, or it may be an emphasis upon those characteristics 
of the object by virtue of which in any particular case it would 
come into the interest relation, by virtue of which it could be 
the object of such an attitude ; or, on the other hand, this in- 
sistence upon the objectivity of value may refer to some sup- 
posed aspect of the object which is beyond experience and which 
thus does not constitute value in any ordinary or even easily 
intelligible sense of the word. 

But such a definition as I have defended does not without 
further application and discussion offer any full answer to the 
questions which to my mind express the chief motives for in- 
quiring into the subject of value theory. It does not say why 
some objects are more valuable than others, nor whether there 
are essentially different sorts of value. It does not answer the 
question as to how values are related to judgment and to each 
other. To answer such questions or give any information on 
these matters, our definition must be applied to concrete cases 
of valuing; an application which in view of the ubiquity of the 
value situation is not far to seek. 

A book, for example, has value in so far and only in so far 
as it enters into the interest relation. If a school boy dislikes 
his Elementary Plane Geometry, the book has for him a negative 
value. To object that the book really has positive value, that 
it is objectively valuable, even though the school boy should 
hate it, is merely to say that the book is capable of being the 
object of some other interest than the boy's. 

This objection in most cases would probably mean that, 
regardless of the boy's attitude, the book ought to be liked by 
him. But if there is any obligation on the boy to like the book, 
it must be because the book in some way is good for him, because 



250 A STUDY IN THE THEOBY OF VALVE 

it really fulfills an interest which the boy now has or will some 
day have. This interest may not come to the boy's own knowl- 
edge until much time has passed, until he has had more ex- 
perience, until he is capable, as we say, of exercising better judg- 
ment. But if the book is to have value for him at all, then it 
must be the case that at some time in the course of his develop- 
ment he will need the book, will have an interest in it. 

Again, this objection might mean that, although the book 
never should come to be in any sense liked or desired by the 
boy, it would still, as an object in itself, have value, that it is 
in fact in itself objectively valuable. But in this case the ob- 
jector must mean to say that the book is somehow acceptable 
to a rational subject ; that it is of such a nature or has such a 
content that it is capable of fulfilling the interest of a rational 
subject, contains information that is needed, is capable in this 
sense of being liked. 

Finally the objection might mean that the book is inherently 
of the nature of the whole, that it is part of reality and is there- 
fore independently valuable, has no need of an interested subject 
to give it its value-status. But we have seen that in so far as 
the book is "of the nature of the whole," it is simply not 
humanly or finitely accessible. If, however, the independent 
inherent value of the book means simply its felt perfection or 
satisfaction, then we must admit that just so far as this per- 
fection is felt, just so far is the book the object of a motor- 
affective attitude. Altogether it seems fairly adequate to define 
value as constituted in a relation which occurs only where there 
is a motor-affective attitude on the part of a subject. 

But to make value thus a matter of motor-affective response 
does not deny that there are judgments of value, nor that these 
judgments have logical implications. To say that value is itself 
constituted in a relation that is not logical does not deny that 
we make judgments as to the value of things nor that these 
judgments commit us logically to other judgments. If I value 



TEE STATUS AND THE KINDS OF VALUE 251 

the pencil I write with, and if I am conscious of this valuing 
and express it verbally in the judgment that this pencil is 
valuable, i.e., is good for something, I am committed to judging 
that the various materials and processes and efforts that went 
to make the pencil were good for something. In as far as a 
machine pressed this graphite into a useful form, the machine 
was good for something, that is, for just this putting of the 
graphite into the right shape ; it was so far valuable. But, as 
we can make logical statements about the greenness of the pencil, 
without calling greenness logical, so our logical conclusions about 
the value of the pencil do not say anything as to the logical 
nature of the value of the pencil. There is no reason apparently 
why we should not make judgments about the most illogical or 
non-logical things and still be logically involved in the impli- 
cations of our judgments. Of course, if it were true that every- 
thing about which we can judge is logical, then value would be 
logical ; but in that case, to say that value is logical is to say 
only that in some sense or other it is; it is not saying anything 
distinctive as to its nature or its status. Thus Avhile our defi- 
nition denies the logical nature of value or valuing, it leaves 
much to be said about value judgments and their logical impli- 
cations ; and if it is to be of any service, it should help us to say 
these things clearly. 

How much it allows us to say remains to be seen, but at least 
two things I think we are prepared to make clear on the basis 
of the previous discussion. The first of these is that, in the 
light of our definition of value, we can see what there is in 
common among all the kinds of value that we are accustomed 
to distinguish from each other. We can see that the value of 
a silver spoon is the same sort of thing as the value of a babj^, 
that the value of a sheet of music-paper is the same sort of 
thing as the value of a symphony, that the value of gold is the 
same sort of thing as the value of a crucifix. And this is not 
saying that spoons and babies, and paper and symphonies, and 



252 A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALUE 

gold and criieifixes are all equally valuable. It is saying that 
they are, in respect of value, comparable ; a fact which would 
seem to be fairly manifest in our modern habit of insuring both 
the baby and the spoon, of paying for the paper or for an 
opportunity of listening to the symphony, of pricing the crucifix 
according to the amount of gold there is in it. Of course it will 
be immediately objected that insurance benefit is not an adequate 
recompense for the loss of the baby, or that the religious value 
of the crucifix is not measured by what we pay for the precious 
metal in it ; but if our definition of value is of any real service, 
it is just here that it should offer assistance. 

Is it true that the baby is simply worth more than the silver ? 
Or is it the case that the respective values of baby and silver 
are different matters altogether, to be measured in different 
ways? If we must accept the latter alternative, it seems to me 
that our definition of value just so far fails as a definition. If 
we can accept the former, however, if baby and silver are valu- 
able in the same sense, then we shall have to make it clear that 
in saying this we are not really insulting the baby or unduly 
treating persons as mere means. We shall have to accept in 
full what seems to me a more consistent account of the whole 
matter. A step towards such consistency is exemplified in the 
removal of our prejudices against insuring churches against 
fire. We have come to admit that God's own house in its earthly 
aspect of a building of stone or brick or wood is subject to 
earthly contingencies; God's house takes on as distinct from its 
holiness, its religious value, another value to be measured in 
terms of actual money cost of replacing it. But perhaps we 
are not quite willing to admit that its very sanctity, if the 
sanctity constitutes its religious value — that this sanctity, if it 
is worth anything, is valuable in just the sense that the Avood 
and the stones are valuable of which the church is made, and 
in just the sense that the labor is valuable that went to build 
the church or that would go to tear it down after it had been 



THE STATUS AND THE KINDS OF VALUE 253 

struck by lightning or to remodel it into a wholesale fruit house. 
"What we must do, if our definition really holds, is to admit 
that as valuable all things that have value are on the same plane. 

This is not to say that there is no meaning in distinguishing 
religious or esthetic or ethical values from each other or from 
economic ones, but it is to insist that the concept of value is 
available to describe all value situations, and that, since this is 
the case, the religious value of a mass, for example, is not alto- 
gether unappropriately secured for a soul by the payment of a 
certain amount of money. Perhaps it is not always the most 
worthy souls that have most masses said for them ; but this may 
be the fault of practical arrangements, and it should not inter- 
fere with an acknowledging of the self-identity of value when- 
ever or wherever value occurs. 

Secondly, I think that, on the basis of our definition of value, 
we are prepared to give an acceptable account of the implication 
of values in each other, or rather of the implications as to the 
existence of so-called higher values which judgments of value 
in the most everyday matters contain. This amounts, as it seems 
to me, to illustrating one phase of Bosanquet's statement that 
"there is a road from every natural group of facts to every 
spiritual reality in the universe ; and the essential nature of 
mind forces it always in some degree to traverse this road, and 
that in the direction from less to more."'^* Or, it amounts to 
giving one particular illustrative content to Aristotle's concep- 
tion of human nature which Santayana approves and summarizes 
in a sentence in The Life of Beaso)i: "... everything ideal has 
a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development."'^*'' 

On the one hand our definition of value makes it possible 
to render some account of the identical nature of value present 
in all genuine cases of value, from the love of money to the love 
of man or the love of God. On the other hand it gives a basis 
upon which to exhibit the implication of the existence of 



74 The Value and Destiny of the Individual, p. 111. 
74" Op. cit., vol. 1, p. 21. 



254 A STUDY IN TEE THEOBY OF VALUE 

"higher" values in judgments upon "lower" ones, and justifies 
and makes intelligent our speaking of values of different sorts. 

Our first point, then, is some account of the identical nature 
of value as it appears in all eases of valuing. "What I am inter- 
ested in showing here is nothing original. It is more or less 
tacitly admitted, for example, in our accepting remuneration 
for services. But it is not explicitly admitted even in such 
matters. An artist is apt to feel that he has somehow demeaned 
himself when he has sold his productions for money. Again, 
we emphasize the importance of industrial insurance measures, 
but we should certainly find it tactless to comfort a recently 
bereaved widow by a reference to insurance benefit. In other 
words, our more and more extensive development of the ex- 
change value system of modern capitalism would seem to indicate 
that we are prepared to apply the value concept more and more 
completely to all aspects of life ; but on the other hand we feel 
some hesitation in asserting boldly that everything that there 
is can in principle be valued in the same sense ; and, if valuing 
implies a measure of value, then also we hesitate to admit that 
the value of everything can on principle be measured in the 
same units. I say on principle, because of course it would not 
follow that there is a practical machinery by which values can 
always be assessed, even if value be in some instances measur- 
able or in all cases essentially comparable. But if our definition 
of value is really applicable in all those situations to which the 
term value is applied, then value is always the same sort of 
thing. And by the same sort of thing I do not mean the same 
sort of physical entity ; just what value is, in fact, our definition 
has said : it is the existence of an interest relation between a 
subject and its object. 

One of the reasons, I suppose, for the very common feeling 
that different sorts of value are of entirely different natures 
from each other, that the "higher" values are altogether dif- 
ferent from the "lower," is that in the case of a so-called 



TEE STATUS AND TEE KINDS OF VALUE 255 

"higher" vahie, the object valued is apt to be less tangible than 
in the ease of a "lower" one. It may therefore help to put all 
values on the same plane, if we dwell for a moment on the dis- 
tinction between values and objects of value. It is of course 
true that what we value may have various sorts of existence or 
reality; but the judgment that A is valuable means just as 
much, makes in fact the same predication concerning A, whether 
A be a deed of charity, or the writing of a novel, or a gold 
watch. That is to say, that which is valued need not be a physical 
object ; it may be an ethical act or an act of esthetic creation. 
In fact A may be itself a valuing or a judgment of value. The 
condition that anything of any sort whatever be valued is not 
that the object exist in any particular sense of the word exist- 
ence rather than another, but that however the object exist, 
whether as an external physical thing, or as what we call a 
tendency toward moral activity, a good disposition or a good 
will, or as an ability to make objects beautiful, or as a motor- 
affective attitude of liking, or as a judgment of value — that, 
however the object exist, it be a term in an interest relation, 
that towards which the interest is directed. If one enjoys a 
poem or approves another man's act or wants a watch, then the 
poem, the act, and the watch are in so far valuable. And so 
of another's or one's own valuings or judgments of value. 

Realizing this, it seems to me, helps to clear up some of our 
difficulty. The intangibleness of the object of the liking has 
nothing to do with the existence of the liking itself; and the 
value depends, as we have just shown, on the establishment of 
the interest relation, that is, of the liking. A feeling or belief 
that value exists independently of a subject, that it is inherent 
in the object itself, is likely to lead us to seek a tangible object 
as the necessary seat of any tangible value. But once we acknowl- 
edge that value of any sort whatever lies in the interest relation 
which a subject may assume, whether towards five-dollar gold 
pieces or towards the most intangible and difficultly definable 



256 A STUDY IN THE THEOBY OF VALUE 

object — once we acknowledge this, we no longer look for a solid 
base upon which to rest the value in question, a reality or sub- 
stance in which the value is to inhere. We do not need to be 
able to locate and define the status of the object in order to be 
assured of its value or to define the status of its value. I may 
value my own wildest fancies; and all the reality those fancies 
need in order to be really valuable is simply and solely their 
ability to be the object of my interest. 

The great importance in one particular field of this concep- 
tion of value, as constituted by the interest relation and by 
nothing else, will appear in the last chapter of this essay in a 
discussion of standards of literary criticism. For the present 
I wish to anticipate some general misunderstandings and ob- 
jections. 

In the first place I am not maintaining that, say, Beman 
and Smith's mathematics texts are to be rated in accordance 
with either the amount of schoolboy love or the amount of school- 
boy hate that is directed towards them. I am only saying that 
when we do rate them, we are taking into account the interests 
they serve. If they serve these interests more adequately by 
virtue of being pleasant to their schoolboy readers, then their 
value is so far enhanced. If their being hated by schoolboys 
is a sign that they serve these interests well, then the school- 
boy's hatred of them is a sign of their positive value. But their 
having the highest positive value in the world would not prevent 
their having at the same time negative value for him who hates 
them. If 0. is a line, its being parallel to h does not interfere 
with its intersecting c or d at right angles. That is, a may enter 
into two different relations at once ; and so of the Beman and 
Smith Geometry. To the boy its value is negative, to the same 
boy its value may later be positive ; the boy, that is, may come 
to have a very different attitude towards it ; and to some one 
else, for instance the boy's father, its value is positive all the 
time. 



TEE STATUS AND THE KINDS OF VALUE 257 

Nor am I maintaining that all values are real, in the sense 
in which that statement is apt to be taken; i.e., that one thing 
is as good as another, that, for instance, because I like my own 
fancies and write them down, it is worth your while to read 
them ; or that any watch in a gold case is as good as any other ; 
or that any music that any one happens to enjoy is as fine as 
any other music. I may very much enjoy a concert, which 
some years afterwards, in retrospect, I judge to have been very 
unenjoyable, and which I contemplate with actual aversion. But 
this only means that my present attitude is not the same as my 
former one. The concert as I heard it first had value, but that 
value was not so high as I perhaps judged it to be at the time. 
This does not alter the fact, however, that there was value in 
the first instance ; it indicates my inadequate training in matters 
of musical taste. The concert had positive value in so far as 
it pleased me; my present recollection of it has negative value 
in so far as this recollection is distasteful. But even admitting 
that the concert and the recollection of it are, for the point at 
issue, the same object, there is no contradiction here. The fact 
is simply that I have in the meantime changed ; so that the 
concert was the object of one subject, the recollection of another. 
But I may seem to have introduced a new notion of value in 
saying that my first judgment as to the value of the concert 
was erroneous. In fact there emerges at this point the apparent 
absurdity of denying that the concert was either good or bad. 
If I judge it bad and then later judge it good ; or if it seems 
bad to me and good to my neighbor; and if all these judgments 
are simply the registering of actual likes and dislikes, what are 
we to say of the concert ultimately? 

My answer first of all would be to question your being able 
to mean anything by ultimate in this connection, at least to 
assert that the word refers to what is beyond experience. In 
the end I can not say anything about the concert. In the end, 
ultimately, means after time is over, or in the Absolute perhaps. 



258 A STUDY IN THE THEOBT OF VALVE 

And I can not talk about the concert at all in this connection. 
The context simply is not one in which finite experience can 
occur, much less make judgments. 

But I would of course admit that my later judgment is some- 
times better than my earlier, or that a musician's criticism of 
a concert may express a more important judgment than that of 
one who is not a musician. But what does this mean? Simply, 
I think, that I find that I actually do lay higher value on my 
present valuations than on my earlier ones. To say that my 
judgment of today is better than my judgment of ten years ago 
is merely recording the fact that towards my present judgment 
I have a motor-affective attitude of liking, whereas, towards my 
judgment of ten years ago I am indifferent or even averse. To 
say that I value a musician's judgment of the concert is only 
to say that I prefer such a judgment to the judgment of the un- 
musical or the musically illiterate. In other words, I see no 
difficulty for our definition in this change, in this difference in 
value of the same thing. • If value is constituted by motor- 
affective attitude, it may be expected to change, and I see no 
reason either to doubt the fact or to deprecate the phenomenon. 
It amounts to admitting that men themselves change and that 
the judgment that there are eternal values is an act of faith. 

To find that values are constituted by motor-affective atti- 
tudes towards any sort of object whatever, does, I think, deny 
that valuing is a matter of logic ; but it certainly has no fatal 
implications as to the nature of man or God or the Universe. 
Admittedly our motor-affective attitudes are the results of hered- 
ity and environment, but who would seek nobler or more satis- 
factory origins? I see no more objection to putting our faith 
in them than to putting it in reason or an Absolute or a God. 
At any rate the value I lay on developed as against undeveloped 
judgment in matters of any sort, the value I lay on likings based 
on wide and deep experience, or on appreciations of "difficult" 
versus "easy" beauty — this value is just as clearly a matter of 



TEE STATUS AND THE KINDS OE VALUE 259 

motor-affective response as my liking for warmth or brightness 
or colors. We most of us have more regard for judgments which 
express the existence of motor-affective attitudes of maturity 
than for those that express the existence of motor-affective atti- 
tudes of immaturity. But this only means that we respond 
motor-affectively towards what seems to us to be true, to be part 
of a scheme, to fit the real world. And this is indeed to admit 
that we are logical subjects, but it is not to admit that our 
valuing is a logical activity. In the most complex cases imag- 
inable, where long processes of reasoning have gone on, the re- 
sulting value is always constituted by a motor-affective attitude 
which itself is not a logical or a judgmental activity. We 
simply reach a stage at which we prefer one thing to another. 
The preference may in one sense rest on the most logical grounds 
in the world ; it may, that is to say, follow upon, and only come 
into existence in case of our having lived well and thought much ; 
but it itself is motor-affective, it is preference. And it is no 
disparagement of reason to acknowledge this ; it is merely ad- 
mitting the clear distinction between one sort of response and 
another ; it is repeating that there is a well defined analytically 
discoverable difference between cognitive activity and motor- 
affective attitude. 

Instead of talking about the validity of value judgments, 
then, it might be appropriate and suggestive to talk about the 
value of value judgments. In so doing we should be reminded 
that we do not discover or create values logically, but that we 
record our own valuings, and then in turn value our valuings. 
We record motor-aff'ective attitudes in judgments of value, and 
then we assume attitudes toward our judgments and toward our 
previous attitudes, but the judging and the valuing remain 
distinct. 

So much, then, to indicate the way in which our definition 
would dispose of questions of ultimate or absolute value, of 
questions of real value, of questions as to the validity of value 



260 A STUDY IN TEE THEORY OF VALUE 

or of the validity of value judgments. All values are real in 
the sense in which any value is real, namely, in being interest 
relations. Valuings may be the result of mistakes in judgment 
and so may not be repeated after the mistakes become apparent ; 
but to call some values true and others false is to use terms in 
a way in which they do not rigorously apply, and such usage 
introduces into the discussion of value a fairly hopeless con- 
fusion. 

As to absolute values, the second part of this chapter will 
call attention to certain kinds of value which might be called 
absolute, in that the object of the interest relation in these eases 
is valued for itself rather than for any purpose it serves. But 
thus used, absolute merely means for the purpose of humanity; 
and it would seem fairly obvious that for human beings the 
last authoritative purpose is the general human purpose, what- 
ever that may be, the concept of the general good which Ehren- 
fels has so carefully analyzed."" 

One more suggestion I wish to offer with reference to this 
notion of the self-identity of value. How are we to be recon- 
ciled to applying the same concept in the same sense to such 
contrasting matters as love of God and love of money? Are we 
to admit that our baby or our mother is worth some number of 
dollars? I am not so bold as to assert that our definition offers 
a complete solution to such difficulties ; but it does seem to me 
to throw a considerable light upon them. We already pay moijey 
for men's labor. And money, of course, represents purchasing 
power, puts men who have it into control of this world's goods. 
Moreover, so long as we feel that the fortune a man has accumu- 
lated stands more or less accurately for his deserts, that there 
are no glaring discrepancies betAveen what he has and what he 
should have, we give him our admiration, our affection, as hu- 
manly we must give affection to what seems to us good. Thus 
money does buy fame and love ; and money has been thought to 
buy eternal rest with God. 



73 Cf . System der Wefttheorie, vol. 2, pp. 41-50. 



THE STATUS AND TEE KINDS OF VALUE 261 

This last is no doubt fantastic, and the former unfair ; but 
we may reasonably think that eternal rest with God is as fan- 
tastic an idea as the purchasing of such rest, and good practice 
would hardly bear us out in giving no consideration to a man's 
worldly possessions when we are to accept or reject him as a 
friend or an idol. My point is merely that it is not unreason- 
able to suppose that money might very well be quite universally 
the measure of value were our financial and social arrangements 
truer to the possibilities they offer of arranging the various parts 
of our world aceordingi to their respective values. If money can 
pay for hours of a man 's day, why not for his life ? These hours 
of labor are part of his life, they are sacred or holy or inviolable 
or whatever else you wish to say of them in just the sense that 
any finite sum of them is; and such a finite sum composes the 
man's whole life. If through carelessness I lose the watch that 
even a wealthy father has given me, his feeling hurt at the loss 
is certainly in part a feeling that I have not adequately valued 
his life. If we could once see clearly that in any just system 
of exchange values money, as one measure of all values, would 
be as sacred as life itself, or life itself no more sacred than 
money, I think it would be a clarification in theory worth the 
trouble and suggestive of better practice. 

My second aim in this chapter is to indicate how "higher" 
values are implied in judgments of value in the bread-and-butter 
region of experience. This implication I have already made 
clear, I think, in describing the consciousness of value in Chapter 
II. But in the light of what I have been saying about the 
identical nature of value in all situations to which the term is 
regularly applied, it may be worth while once more to show 
this implication and to indicate that the self-identity of value 
is not prejudicial to the discerning of different sorts of value 
nor to the acknowledging of the implications of the usual judg- 
ments of value as to the existence of other sorts of value than 
the one in first instance judged about. This is to admit that 



262 A STUDY IN THE TEEOBY OF VALUE 

to judge anything to be extrinsically valuable is to imply the 
existence of values which are intrinsic ; or, more accurately 
worded, it is to imply the existence of something which is in- 
trinsically valued.''*' It is to remind ourselves that valuing is 
not unrelated to the rest of our experience. In so far as pro- 
nouncing a value judgment is saying that A is good for some- 
thing, this value judgment implies, as we shall presently see, 
that there is something good beyond A. And thus in a sense 
"the good" is implied in any of the most ordinary value judg- 
ments. Moreover, as complexes which are all made up of the 
same sort of elements may be of various degrees of size and 
complexity, so values may be constituted by relations of interest 
which occur only after many other interests have been consid- 
ered and after many judgments of value have been made and 
their implications noted. This statement does not prove the 
point ; but it is enough to show that there need be no confusion 
in speaking of all value as constituted by the same sort of re- 
lation and at the same time distinguishing various sorts of value 
from each other. 

The method I shall use to make my point is simply the 
analysis of a typical case of value judgment. If I say that this 
pencil has value, it is easy to see that I have in so saying com- 
mitted myself to valuing the whole causal sequence that ends 
in the pencil. But is it possible also to show that the judgment 
that is the conscious expression of the fact that I value this 
pencil implies the existence of so-called higher values? 

I have already shown that the difficulty of defining the status 
of ethical or esthetic objects, for example, is no barrier to de- 
fining the status of ethical and esthetic values. For such values 
to exist and to have precisely the status of all values it is only 
necessary that we be capable of assuming an attitude of interest 
towards ethical or esthetic objects ; and that we can do this, no 
one, I think, would be likely to doubt. But I am interested now 



''■6 I use the terms intrinsic and extrinsic as they are defined by George 
Herbert Palmer in The Nature of Goodness, pp. 16-19. 



TEE STATUS AND THE KINDS OF VALUE 263 

to show further that the existence of these so-called higher values 
is implied in the simplest judgments of extrinsic value, and 
that this term higher corresponds not to any difference in the 
natures of the values as such, but to the length or complexity 
of the various processes which precede such higher valuings. 

How, then, does my judgment of value that this pencil is 
good for something imply the existence of ethical or esthetic 
values? As it seems to me, the implication may be made clear 
as follows : Ordinarily when we say that an object is valuable 
we mean that it serves a purpose. If there were no purposes 
for it to serve, we could only call it good in itself; and then we 
should be implying, I suppose, that its purpose is simply to be, 
or to continue to be. But to revert to the pencil. It is valu- 
able if it will write ; but if we can show that writing is of no 
value, then the pencil, in so far as its purpose is to write, is of 
no value. And so of every possible use to which the pencil could 
be put. If the use to which it is put is no use, then the pencil 
itself is no use ; it is not valuable. The pencil may still be said 
to have had potential value, but this only means that it was once 
the case that there was a real use to which the pencil could have 
been put. 

And so we may proceed, as I did in Chapter II above. We 
find value where we put it by valuing; but when we pronounce 
the judgment, This is valuable, whatever this may be, we are 
imputing value not to this alone but to whatever this is for. 
Now we find that what all things are for, as far as human beings 
can see that they are for anything, is just satisfactory human 
life, life that seems to be at its best or fullest, a life to which 
we impute value when we thus call it satisfactory or good or 
full. But we find short of the good life itself and its whole 
content, intermediate contents such as ethical acts. For ex- 
ample, the pencil is good for writing; writing in turn is good 
for getting at truth or spreading truth. But getting at truth 
or spreading truth is good, only if truth itself is valuable. And 



264 A STUDY IN THE TMEOBY OF VALUE 

is truth good for anything ? All we can say is that truth is good 
for life itself, that men have always loved the truth, that we 
ourselves, as we develop, come more and more to value truth. 
What truth is, is fortunately not the point at issue ; what comes 
under discussion is our love of truth, whatever truth may be ; 
and this love of truth we are all acquainted with, we simply £nd 
it in ourselves. It is a motor-affective attitude. 

If we value it very highly and if we learn that others value 
it very highly, we may be particularly interested to learn more 
about it ; and thus we may be said to value the truth about truth, 
so that the judgment that truth is valuable in this second case 
implies in first instance the existence of something valuable be- 
yond itself. But it turns out that the name for this something 
is once more simply truth. Thus we may say that there is a 
sense in which judgments of value with reference to truth, i.e., 
judgments that assert that truth is valuable, do not imply the 
existence of anything valuable beyond truth itself, excepting 
always just valuable life. 

There is thus a definite meaning in calling truth intrinsically 
or even finally or independently valuable. This does not mean 
that truth would be valuable were there no one to like it, but 
simply that it is valuable in itself in a way which is not true of 
a pencil. It is all that we want, and our recognizing the fact 
that we want it does not imply that we want anything beyond it. 

But while it thus appears that there is a sense in which 
truth has a value which is intrinsic, it is also the case that truth 
is a way to something beyond itself. If we have truth, and only 
in so far as we have truth, can we k7iow how to act in the right 
way. If truth in general is preferable to untruth, then the 
truth with regard to what it is right to do is worth some- 
thing. But on the other hand, if the truth about doing right 
is worth something, it would seem that the doing right is itself 
worth something, has value. So that, as the value of truth is 
implied in a value-judgment about the pencil, so the value of 
right action is implied in a value-judgment about the truth. 



TEE STATUS AND THE KINDS OF VALUE 265 

And much the same can be said of judgments of value about 
moral acts as I have just said of judgments of value about 
truth. There is, I mean, a sense in which judgments about acts 
which predicate ethical value of those acts imply only the ex- 
istence of the ethically valuable, but there is also a sense in 
which even a good will, besides being just good in itself, or good 
for the good life, may be said to be good for something beyond 
itself. That is, when I say that an act is ethically good, I mean 
that in the circumstances it is the right thing to do; but this 
only means that it conforms to the law of moral obligation, that 
it is truly ethical. If I ask further for the purpose of doing the 
right instead of the wrong thing in the circumstances, I am 
asking a foolish question ; I am taking the meaning out of the 
word right. In human situations there simply always is a right 
thing to be done, if there is anything to be done at all. If there 
is nothing to be done, then the right thing is to do nothing, i.e., 
to refrain from action of certain sorts. Beyond our own moral 
nature to its purpose in being moral, to its use, to what it is 
good for, it is absurd to try to go ; for this would simply be to 
try to get beyond ourselves. As long as we are human beings, 
we are moral creatures ; for us there is no " beyond good and 
evil." To deny this is flat contradiction. To say that it is not 
right to do right, or that it is right not to do right, is for a 
human being nonsensical. Always, either one of the rights is 
not the right in question, or we are being absurd. To say that 
it is right to do wrong is merely to say that wrong is right, 
which means that what some one considers wrong is really right, 
or that what was once considered wrong is really right, or that 
what is wrong in some circumstances or times or places is right 
in others. We can transfer the predicate, so to speak, but we 
can not go beyond it ; our rational human nature seems to 
prevent. 

But even here, where we have again found a sort of value 
which does not seek beyond itself for its justification or for the 
meaning of a value-judgment upon it, simply because it is its 



266 A STUDY IN TEE THEOEY OF VALUE 

own justification and its own meaning, it is still perfectly pos- 
sible to ask the question, What is the right action good for? 
and to give an answer that is not absurd. A good will is simply 
good, it wills the right. Also, of course, the right is what is to 
the advantage of human life in general. But besides being 
intrinsically good, or good for life, right action, like, truth itself, 
is good for contemplation. "We may value for itself the good 
act, which expresses the good will ; but the more completely we 
value it in itself, the more completely do we simply dwell upon 
it in contemplation, give ourselves over to it as our total object, 
lose ourselves in it. And what we are interested in in this 
complete way, in pure contemplation, in disinterested attentive- 
ness, is what we call the esthetically valuable. Thus the good 
may be, just by virtue of being good, of being right, good for 
contemplation. And in this sense we may say that in any 
judgment that a will, or an act in which the will is expressed, 
is ethically good, there is implied the reality of disinterested 
esthetic contemplation, the reality of esthetic interest, the reality 
of esthetic value. Thus ethical value-judgment may always be 
taken to imply the reality of esthetic value. 

As I hope to show somewhat more adequately in the next 
chapter, this does not mean that we are to judge works of art 
by moral precepts. It is in fact probably the case that we often 
learn what is true or what is right from what is valuable simply 
to contemplate, from what enters into the interest relation not 
as an act to be done, or as a truth to be admitted, but as an 
object, just as object, to be looked at or listened to or otherwise 
sensed and felt and ' ' lived. ' ' 

Thus we have three distinct sorts of value, the reality of 
which is implied in any judgment of value of the most ordinary 
sort. Where we have the judgment that a pencil is valuable, 
we have the implication that what is true is valuable as being 
true, that what is right is valuable as being right, that what is 
beautiful is valuable as being beautiful. For we have seen that 
as the judgment of a use-value implies the reality of the value 



THE STATUS AND THE KINDS OF VALUE 267 

of truth, so the judgment that A is true implies the existence 
of the ethical interest relation, the reality of ethical value ; and 
that the judgment that A is right implies the existence of the 
esthetic interest relation, i.e., the reality of esthetic value. 

Since we find that judgments of truth-values or of esthetic 
or ethical values do not imply the reality of values beyond 
themselves in exactly the way in which judgments concerning 
articles of use point to real values beyond themselves ; that these 
three sorts of value are in a sense intrinsic ; and since we find 
also that the reality of these three sorts of value is implied in 
the simplest everyday judgment of use value ; we may there- 
fore with some show of reason call these three sorts of value 
higher values. We need make no attempt to rank values in an 
inclusive scale ; and we may even object to the term higher; 
but at least we have shown a clear distinction between what may 
be called extrinsic and intrinsic values, and of intrinsic values 
we have indicated three sorts. 

But all our value judgments impute value to some sort of 
human life, and since human life is not an absolute in any 
very clear sense, there would seem to be no reason to speak of 
absolute or eternal value in any case. 

Moreover, value, in all these cases, is adequately defined in 
terms of motor-affective attitude. Judgment, while it may be 
instrumental in our coming to the point of assuming the atti- 
tude of liking towards one thing rather than another, never itself 
constitutes that attitude. The liking is all we have. We may 
be able to inquire why we like ; but when we do thus inquire, 
we only analyze one liking into its respective parts or else show 
that one judgment of value implies the existence of another 
value than the one judged. 

For example, to value automobile driving means to value 
what automobile driving is composed of — being in the fresh air, 
exercising certain muscle and nerve complexes, viewing a good 
deal of landscape in a short time, moving very rapidly over the 
ground, being envied, etc., etc. The valuing is thus said to be 



268 A STUDY IN THE THEOEY OF VALUE 

accounted for when it is analyzed. The object of the interest 
relation is made up of objects of other interest relations; part 
of being in the state of driving an automobile is being in the 
state of getting fresh air; hence an interest relation, the object 
of which is getting fresh air, may have for its object automobile 
driving. We may also like one thing better than another be- 
cause it is the condition of getting something else, as we like to 
have an American dime better than a Canadian one because 
having an American dime is the condition of our getting dough- 
nuts and coffee in an American cafeteria. 

And there is the other way of saying why we like or value ; 
the way which in the end always amounts to saying that we value 
the true, the good or the beautiful, that we value the "good 
life." 

But we can not, in either way of saying why we value, rest 
value on anything but valuing. We can not even say that there 
are absolute or eternal values; and if we can speak intelligibly 
of intrinsic values, these are after all identical with all values 
in being constituted by the interest relation, by motor-affective 
response. Value is created by valuing, and valuing is a finite 
human experience involving our motor-aff'ective mechanism. 

Are we to say nothing then of religious values? I have 
mentioned them now and then casually and not too respectfully ; 
and yet surely for many of us masses and crucifixes and churches 
have religious value. For others of us, however, they have not ; 
and if we find that we can speak of our religious values at all, 
we must mean just the motor-affective attitude that we have to- 
wards valuing in general. The religious man is he who values 
all this motor-affective life, who assumes towards it the interest 
relation, who is more interested in the valuing of human life 
than in human life itself. This is the attitude we call reverence, 
or in the extreme case other-worldliness. It may seem to some 
people a poor remnant of a glorious heritage ; to me it seems 
to name the religious attitude, which is thus a motor-affective 
attitude and which constitutes religious values. 



THE STATUS AND TEE KINDS OF VALUE 269 

As to social value, this seems to me to be simply a name for 
a valuing that is the attitude of more than one person. If 
speaking of social values were necessary to remind us that we 
are individuals dependent upon others for life itself and there- 
fore owing it even to ourselves to take other people's attitudes 
into account, it would be a valuable way to speak. But it seems 
to me to be rather a confusing way than a clarifying one, and 
so not valuable. Certainly it is not at present clear what a 
social mind is, and to speak of the valuings of a social mind is 
to go one step further into confusion. 

The result, then, of this investigation is pretty clearly sum- 
marized in the statement of the thesis in the introduction. I 
have defended a definition of value in terms of interest against 
the pragmatists and the idealists, and I have shown how such a 
definition, while it allows us to speak intelligibly of certain types 
of value such as ethical or esthetic as distinct from economic, 
for instance, still forces us to the conclusion that value, being 
a certain relation, namely, the interest relation, exists where that 
relation exists, is constituted by the existence of that relation. 
Such a definition does not deny that we prefer truth to untruth, 
or beauty, even ' ' difficult beauty, ' ' to ugliness ; but it insists 
that our preference in all cases simply is a preference, based 
on nothing deeper or more fundamental, nothing more absolute 
or eternal, than just the nature of our motor-affective appar- 
atus, by means of which we can enter into an interest relation 
at all. It is, as it seems to me, merely an explicit avowal that 
we are limited creatures of a certain type, endowed no doubt 
with what we call reason, but functioning motor-affectively as 
one term in an interest relation, a relation which may be assumed 
towards the interest relation itself. 

In a concluding chapter I wish to apply this theory of value 
to standards of literary criticism. In so doing I think I can 
show how, instead of denying values in this field, it simply makes 
clear what we mean by valuing, and therefore what we must 
mean by criticism and standards of criticism. 



CHAPTER VII 

AN APPLICATION TO THE THEORY OF LITERARY 
CRITICISM 

To the vexed questions of the practice of literary criticism 
and the application of standards in such criticism a general 
theory of value can bring no detailed or expert answers, nor 
can it formulate such standards. But upon the problem of 
standards itself — whether they exist, and if so what they are — ■ 
it should be able to throw light by way of pointing out some of 
the inevitable facts of the situation which criticism expresses 
and some of the principles of action in a situation of this kind. 
A theory of value should obviate, then, some of the difficulties 
in the theory of literary criticism as distinguished from the 
difficulties peculiar to the practice of such criticism. In fact, 
the present chapter will attempt to show that the problems of 
criticism in practice are the problems of life itself. Thus the 
critic must be of noble character, comprehensive mind, and 
sound judgment rather than an expert in any special technique 
beyond that of expression itself. 

But there are among critics controversies in the theory of 
criticism, controversies as to the relative merits of judicial versus 
impressionistic procedure, as to the validity of "scientific" versus 
"literary" standards, as to the finality of the esthetic versus 
the historical point of view; and it seems to me that it is here 
that a sound theory of value may be of some slight service to 
the critics themselves ; for such a theory points out, not the right 
standard indeed, but the futility of most of such controversy, 
and this on the basis of analysis and definitions which are not 
parts of critical theory so much as they are general principles 
of valuing in all fields. Moreover, a general theory of value 



THE THEOEY OF LITERABT CBITICISM 271 

seems to offer full justification for literary criticism as one of 
the typical, not to say inevitable and necessary, activities of 
human beings; for criticism is the formulation of the reaction 
of human minds in a situation involving intrinsic value, a form- 
ulation without which no consistently developing fitness for ade- 
quate reaction could come about, which, in other words, by in- 
creasing the possibilities for reaction actually increases valuing 
and therefore literally adds value to our world. 

In the case of the controversy of judicial versus impression- 
istic criticism, for example, a theory of value, besides exhibiting 
the futility of much of the discussion, shows, as it seems to me, 
what facts about criticism in general these theorists are founding 
their contentions on. In fact, a theory of value at least appears 
to make it demonstrable, instead of merely probable or accept- 
able for common sense, that the issue is merely one of emphasis. 
For it is clear in the light of our theory of value that to have 
criticism at all there must be both the direct motor-affective 
reaction (however complex and inclusive this may be) and the 
expression of this reaction in rational discourse, in logical form. 
The question of priority either as a matter of rank or of prece- 
dence in time thus becomes just as trivial as the question of the 
hen and the egg. Judgment is the name for the post facto 
expression in rational terms of impressions, that is, of motor- 
affective attitudes. But a rational being is some sort of unity, 
however loose or ill-defined, and the impressions to which he is 
open are largely determined by the state of development of his 
mind, a development which, in at least one of its important 
aspects, amounts to the logical process of making a series of 
judgments. Thus while judgments only express impressions, 
impressions are inevitably conditioned by previous judgments. 

The present chapter can not of course be in any sense ex- 
haustive or even logically final ; it is merely an attempt to show 
how in some few typical cases of literary criticism and of contro- 
versy over literary criticism and the theory of literary criticism, 



272 A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALVE 

a general theory of value renders the issue clearer, or reveals 
the absence of any fundamental issue, or shows a fallacy 
underlying the critical activity cited. It was questions about 
literary value that led to the present investigation, and it seems 
to me justification enough for the essay if it throws some light 
on these questions. 

In the first place, in general, it must be clear from the theory 
above set forth that the value of a poem is as real as the value 
of a bushel of wheat. In fact, Chapter VI showed that value 
in each of these cases means exactly the same thing, and further, 
that only in case of the reality of such direct intrinsic value as 
that of a poem can there be any value attributed to the wheat. 
This depends upon two considerations : first, that men will only 
ends and never merely means ; and second, that the nature of 
an end is always a direct relation of liking an object as it is 
present to the subject ; in other words, that all ends are esthetic, 
if esthetic, as seem.s to be the case, is the proper word to use 
in characterizing direct emotional contemplation. Certainly in 
the cases just instanced the matter is clear. If we like to run 
our hands through the wheat, then the wheat gives us direct 
satisfaction ; we contemplate it by touch ; we have an elementary 
esthetic experience. If the wheat is valuable only as a means 
to the end that we be nourished, then it is valuable only if we 
contemplate the being nourished with satisfaction ; for life as 
existence merely and not as valued existence can not be an 
end — a fact constantly evidenced by the sacrifice of life for 
other ends, namely, for a better life that can be satisfactorily 
contemplated. 

In the case of the wheat there is a market price per bushel, 
but as I have suggested in the preceding chapter, it is no dero- 
gation of the poet's work that there is also a price per word 
or per line in the verse market. It is true enough that in the 
case of poems more mistakes appear to be made than in the case 
of such commodities as wheat, but so far as we can measure 



TEE THEOBY OF LITERABY CBITICISM 273 

the value of the poem at all, we can compare its value with that 
of the wheat, even though the difference in value he indefinitely 
great either way. The poem, not being subject to the ravages 
of time, may be capable of satisfying an enormous number of 
human beings through generations; and its value, being consti- 
tuted by these relations to human beings, actually grows as 
time goes on. But our criticism of it is precisely an attempt 
to render this satisfaction that it gives and will continue to give, 
in terms of rational discourse ; and if we were pricing poems, 
there is no doubt that some of us would put the Shakespeare 
sonnets, for example, quite out of the reach of any individual. 
We do not price poems, because, after all, they are intangible 
goods of indefinitely great value perhaps. We price copyrights 
and no doubt make many mistakes in doing so; but our critical 
considerations are of just the same sort as those incident to our 
evaluations of various more or less expensive brands of wine, for 
instance, or of tobacco. From the fact that we prefer one brand 
to another it does not follow that the price even differs, and 
we may very well prefer the cheaper brand; but we do value 
the one above the other, just as, in spite of economic theory and 
usage, we often value water itself above the most expensive 
wines, in the accepted sense of the word value, a word which 
economic science has chosen to define more or less arbitrarily, 
because, as it would seem, Economics has been more interested 
in measuring and in things measurable than in values. 

Moreover, our valuing of the tobacco or the wine grows out 
of previous experience, and the formulation of previous ex- 
perience in judgments, in precisely the same way in which our 
criticism of the poem grows out of our previous literary ex- 
perience and the formulation of our previous experience in 
judgments about literature. 

But whatever may be our relations to such commodities as 
wheat, it is clear that in the case of the poem we have a direct 
relation. Some one actually enjoys the poem, and we can not 



274 A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALUE 

do otherwise than pronounce it good, than acknowledge in a 
cognitive judgment that it has value. And here we are mindful 
that not our judgment but the liking for the poem, the satisfied 
or pleasurable contemplation of the poem, actually constitutes 
its value; that our judgment is the post facto expression of the 
fact that value was present in a certain situation, the relation 
established between a human subject and this particular object. 
Our rendering of this fact is expressed in the words that the 
poem has value ; and we are perfectly justified also in saying 
that the poem is beautiful, if we have been careful not to limit 
the word beautiful to the charming or the sweet or some other 
special quality, but have kept it for just this situation of satis- 
factory esthetic contemplation, the contemplation that makes the 
successful surgeon, for example, pronounce his operation beau- 
tiful — ^not successful, or accurate, or effective, but satisfactory 
for contemplation — an esthetic object viewed as such by the 
adequate spectator. 

It should be clear, then, that our theory has indicated how 
all value is esthetic in the regularly accepted view of the mean- 
ing of both of these terms, value and estheMc — not the view 
that would usually be expressed theoretically, perhaps, but the 
view that seems to be necessarily implied in ordinary English 
usage, when judgments of value are pronounced. The empti- 
ness of even moral judgments of value, the purely formal nature 
of the morally right, is also clear; for the act judged right 
according to the moral law has its rightness in the very fact 
of this conformity ; but it is a good act, it has value, only if it 
is satisfactory to .jnteniplate directly, or if it is a means to 
some other direct satisfactory contemplation, a means to the 
establishing of a motor-affective relation of liking between a 
conscious subject and an object. Actual content, real value, is 
always esthetic. 

The value of literature is thus, like all real values, esthetic; 
and to talk about esthetic criticism as only one phase of literary 



TBE THEOBY OF LITEBABY CBITICISM 275 

criticism is usually to mistake the nature of value, or to use 
the word esthetic in some esoteric sense that makes of art one 
of the trifles of the idler instead of the most valuable possession 
of human beings. It is true that estheticians have tried long 
and hard to formulate and establish some such limited definition 
of the word esthetic; but the failure of these attempts is notor- 
ious. It is significant that both Croce, the idealist, and San- 
tayana, the naturalist, have been both profound enough and 
honest enough to realize the breadth in meaning required in the 
consistent use of the word, and to proclaim the identity of the 
experience of achieving an end with the experience called esthetic 
contemplation. Croce has put it as the identity of art and ex- 
pression ; Santayana has clearly exhibited the sense in which all 
ends are esthetic.'^'' 

The controversy, then, as to the esthetic versus the historic 
or scientific or intellectual sort of literary criticism can only be 
carried on in case one means by esthetic what no one, as it would 
seem, can consistently mean by the term, or in case one has 
failed to comprehend the nature of value. All literary criticism 
is esthetic, for all literary criticism is rational discourse about 
literature, and is therefore the expression of judgments about 
ends, of judgments of value. But value is itself esthetic in 
the clear, necessary sense of the word, and to scoff at esthetic 
criticism is to join in an abuse of the word esthetic that is much 
akin to identifying preciosity with good writing, or delicacy of 
sensibilities with noble character. The two may be closely re- 
lated, but to identify them is like equating a man with his taste 
in tea or in tobacco. ■ , , 

A second confusion in much literary criticism is due to the 
use of the term literary itself. In the quotations from Professor 
Saintsbury in Chapter I of this essay this confusion is illus- 
trated. The term frequently occurs in this sense in lectures 
and in writing. Even such a critic as Edmund Gosse offers 



■^■^ Croce, Aesthetic, English translation, chap. I; Santayana, Sense of 
Beauty, chap. I, especially pp. 28-31. 



276 'A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALUE 

examples of the usage/ ^ and it is so widespread that names or 
passages are hardly needed to illustrate it. Very often the word 
pure is added to emphasize the point : "As pure literature this 
ranks so-and-so." This phrasing is perhaps partly justified by 
the fact that so very many critics insist upon all sorts of con- 
siderations instead of, or along with, those which a theory of 
value shows to be pertinent. Problem plays and other works 
of art with "messages" suggest examples in abundance. But 
however much outraged the critic may be by such abuses, how- 
ever much he may be justified in avoiding extraneous matters, 
he is apt himself to err when he speaks of "pure" literature. 
In fact, examination of the phrase in the light of our theory 
of value indicates the false abstraction that the critic has usually 
made. For of course pure literature is just literature devoid 
of qualities. We do not in the presence of literature become 
a special sort of subject with a special literary faculty to be 
exercised upon what is before us. What we do, the only possible 
thing for us to do, is to turn our attention to the book or the 
poem in question. We either like it or we dislike it ; or we like 
or dislike various parts or aspects of it. Our liking or our dis- 
liking will depend upon our previous reading and upon our 
experience, upon our whole equipment for contemplating this 
particular literary object. But the only genuine opinion that 
we can have of the book must be the expression of this direct 
relation in which we stand to it. And this relation is not in 
any very clear sense "purely literary"; it is not a relation 
established between a literary faculty and an object of such a 
faculty; it is a relation between our whole conscious self and 
the object of our emotional consciousness, and it has as much 
to do with our capacity for truth, our knowledge of science, our 
logical acumen, the development of our sense organs, the type 



■'s See, e.g., his History of Eighteenth Century Literature: "To the 
purely literary student, etc.," p. 306, "we must return to our opening 
reservation, and remind ourselves that what is written, what is contrib- 
uted to thought, is not valuable in literature in proportion to its intel- 
lectual quality," p. 386. 



TEE THEOBY OF LITEEABY CRITICISM 277 

of our mental imagery, and all the rest of our organic, unified 
self, as it has to do with any of our special aptitudes ; be they 
literary or not literary. This evaluation in terms of "pure" 
literature appears to be a survival of an outworn doctrine of 
substance, and we can only remind those who affect to recognize 
pure literature and purely literary value either that they are 
mystics, whose word may at the most be acceptable in some 
more or less mystical sense, or else that they have fallen into 
an error that invalidates what they say. For the value of a 
book or a poem is the value of its qualities, not the value, to 
use Locke's phrase, of a something, I know not what, in which 
these qualities inhere. The value of a book is no such mysterious 
entity ; it is constituted, in fact, by the motor-affective relation 
of a conscious human subject to the book. It is thus clear that 
except for practice in expression, the most adequate critic is 
simply the most adequate human being — a fact which accounts 
for the emptiness of so much expert literary criticism. The 
best criticism is simply the most accurate expression of the most 
fully human response to the book, for it is this response itself 
that constitutes the value of the book, and it is the expression 
of this response in logical terms that constitutes criticism. 

A third point at which a rational theory of value enters to 
clear away some of the dust of critical controversy is one upon 
which several contemporary critics are engaged. One of the 
issues of the present day, that is, seems to be that between the 
so-called judicial critics and the impressionists. Anatole France 
may be called the arch impressionist, perhaps, with his much 
cited endeavor to tell pleasantly of the adventures of his soul 
among masterpieces, and not to work the threshing machines 
which separate the literary grain from the chaff. The judicial 
critics are represented by such Americans as Mr. Irving Babbitt, 
and Mr. Brownell.'^'' 



79 Mr. Brownell 's own formulation may be quoted from his Criticism 
(1914), p. 58, where he says of criticism: "Its function is judicial, and 
its business to weigh and reason rather than merely to testify and 
record." 



278 A STUDY IN THE THEORY OF VALUE 

The whole matter may be referred to our theory of value 
with advantage, it seems to me, because that theory indicates 
two inevitable aspects of criticism. In the first place, as I have 
just shown, there must be a reaction upon the work criticized, 
a reaction which is not that of any purely literary faculty, but 
the acceptance or rejection in whole or in part of the work at 
hand. And since the work at hand is a complex expression of 
life in some aspect or other, and the reaction that of a very 
complex organism, this reaction, to be adequately given in words, 
will require the formulating of many judgments. "What the 
judgments formulate, however, can be nothing more than this 
complex reaction ; they can be nothing else, that is, than the 
rendering articulate of all the elements that go to make up 
such a reaction, the impressions produced on the mind, the 
"adventures of the soul," if you like. On the other hand, as 
our theory of value has also shown, the rendering of such im- 
pressions in verbal form can not well avoid constituting value- 
judgments. For the words that are used by the most impres- 
sionistic of critics are expressive of value. It may seem merely 
to describe the poem when we call it tender, for example, but 
if tender is pronounced by the critic's voice, it carries value 
connotation, and we can not really read the critic's words with- 
out such value connotation. Being tender is one way of being 
worth something. To take the value connotation entirely away 
leaves the word without even any denotation, leaves it indeed 
meaningless. Thus the rendering of im.pressions in language is 
precisely the making of judgments of value. 

We can therefore conclude at once that all judicial criticism 
must be the rendering of impressions, and that all rendering of 
impressions must be the pronouncing of judgments of value, 
must in this sense be judicial. The functioning of the reasoning 
faculties that the judicial critic insists upon may indeed precede 
the writing out of his criticism, but it remains the fact that 
all that he can actually tell us about the work that he happens 
to be criticizing must be his impressions of that work. He may 



TEE TEEOEY OF LITEBABY CBITICISM 279 

put this into a consistently logical form, in fact he must put it 
into such a form if it is to hold for other rational beings ; but 
this is true of any discourse whatever that is to be accepted by 
rational beings. And while there would seem to be no escape 
from this requirement, the function that the critic fulfills for 
the rest of us would appear to demand on his part primarily 
the ability to react fully to the work in hand ; what is peculiar 
to the critic would thus appear to be adequate reaction. His 
judicial function is necessarily carried out if he renders his 
impressions clearly ; and there is little danger that his lack of 
logical consistency will do any lasting harm, for it inevitably 
defeats itself. Logical contraditions, once seen, can not con- 
tinue to exist in human minds. If the conclusion drawn at the 
beginning of this paragraph appear dogmatic in the form in 
which it is stated, certainly no one will be apt to accuse the as- 
sertion of dogmatism if it is taken as merely descriptive of the 
usual practice of the two sorts of critics. 

There are two further considerations to be noted at this 
point. The first is the tremendous, not to say indispensable, 
part that impressions play in criticism. Surely those men whose 
impressions are at all adequate to great books, or even to any 
book written by a mind not their own, are rare enough to make 
us think long before we say anything in disparagement of even 
professedly impressionistic criticism. The second consideration 
is that criticism, since it is in the form of judgments, must 
necessarily be logically responsible for its own logical impli- 
cations. This is really, I suppose, much of the cause of quarrel. 
For while human beings may have opposing impulses, and while 
their motor-affective attitudes do not work all to one end with- 
out conflict, logical judgments can not contradict each other and 
still be valid. Nor may the implications of logical judgments 
contradict each other and still leave to the judgments their 
validity. And here the impressionist, if taken literally and care- 
lessly or stupidly, may appear absurd; or finally he may, being 
an un-unified, disorganized human being, write himself and his 



280 A STUDY IN THE TEEOBY OF VALUE 

impressions down in judgments which destroy each other, or 
the implications of which destroy the original proposition. Con- 
sistency is not required of our reactions, is not a term indeed 
that always in the first instance applies to reactions; but incon- 
sistent logical statements simply destroy each other, and if our 
expression of our impressions takes the form of contradictory 
judgments, our discourse kills itself. So that while criticism 
cannot be anything but the articulation of impressions, criticism 
that is to be accepted by rational minds must be consistent — 
must therefore be in accordance with principles. 

This brings us to the fourth point upon which our theory of 
value should throw light. What are these principles of criti- 
cism? Are they a special set of standards such as Aristotelian 
probability, and the classic unities? Or are they simply the 
principles of logic itself as applied in discourse upon books and 
poems? The answer in the light of our previous discussion is 
obvious; and we may say a priori that beyond (1) the laws of 
logic, i.e., the ways necessary to or forced upon a rational mind, 
and (2) the data at hand upon which minds operate, there is 
nothing further except (3) the activity itself, the actual oper- 
ation upon the data. But in such an argument it is the more 
modern way of procedure to turn to the standards that exist 
and see (1) whether they are properly to be called principles 
and (2) whether they are in any way peculiar to literature, or 
are simply names for quite general principles or for such general 
principles when they happen to be operating upon the data 
furnished by books and poems. 

One or two illustrations must suffice ; and it may be noted 
at the outset that the demand for criticism in accord with 
standards has been accompanied by very little in the way of 
actually formulated principles. Mr. Brownell suggests that the 
critical principles "have hardly varied since Aristotle's day,"**" 
but one can not help wishing that Mr. Brownell would formulate 
these ' ' postulates, ' ' so that they might become as definite a part 



80 W. C. Brownell, Criticism, p. 47. 



TEE TREOBY OF LITEEARY CBITICISM 281 

of our mental content as the postulates of Euclid to which he 
compares them. The lack of formulation, however, is what we 
should expect if I am right as to the nature of the demand for 
standards, or criticism in accord with standards, that the critics 
make. For if having standards means being logically consistent, 
then all that the critics are demanding is what all minds de- 
mand in all cases of rational discourse. If on the other hand 
standards are to name the various characteristics that are liked 
by human beings, then even judicial critics will admit that the 
number of ' ' standards ' ' would seem to be indefinitely great and 
at least to range from the most fanciful to the most rigorously 
logical, from the sweetest to the most bitter, from romance to 
realism, from the judiciously consistent to the flagrantly inju- 
dicious. Of all these standards or qualities it could only be 
said that those that are most satisfactory to most minds will 
be most valuable, remembering that in the end, as we have faith 
at least — a sort of Humean faith — minds are alike in structure 
and are even the image of whatever we mean by the divine, so 
that they are best suited by what best fits them and their powers, 
in the end by that which is noblest and truest and most beautiful, 
by that which is nearest the divine itself. 

The two possibilities, then, both oppose serious difficulties 
to those who would formulate literary standards. For logical 
principles themselves, standard though they may be, are not 
peculiarly literary, or peculiar to literature. On the other hand 
the names of the vast number of desirable qualities would in 
the first place be too numerous and too particular to be called 
standards; in the second place, if only certain important ones 
were selected from the rest, they would either be general enough 
to be synonymous with the word literary itself — we hear of 
literary emotions or the literary emotions*^ — -or, being more par- 
ticular, they would not be agreed upon by critics of varying 
types of mind, and so could not very readily be established as 



81 Cf. e.g., C. T. Winchester, Principles of Literary Criticism, chap. Ill, 
where the author repeatedly speaks of the "literary emotions." 



282 A STUD¥ IN THE THEOBY OF VALUE 

standards. Further, when we have found qualities universally 
or even at all generally satisfactory, they will be qualities, I 
should suppose, not peculiar to literature. They would be stand- 
ards of the good life in general. 

Now to cite one or two of these so-called standards: Let us 
take the unities, probability, and Matthew Arnold's high seri- 
ousness. It seems to me only too clear that the first is a logical 
requirement, that the last is merely a name for that which is 
satisfactory to noble minds, as Matthew Arnold conceived nobil- 
ity of mind, and that the confusion about the second arises from 
its being in one sense a logical requirement, in another the name 
for a satisfying quality. 

Unity is a demand of the mind. We have seen the artificial 
unities gradually debarred from their high place of authority, 
and we have found that almost all that we can demand is that 
unity which defines a poem as one poem, an object of contem- 
plation as one object. We are tempted to suggest that Kant 
said more to the purpose of critical theory when he put unity 
into his table of the categories of thought than did Aristotle 
when he spoke so portentously of a beginning, a middle, and an 
end — although no doubt for the purposes of literary practice the 
Aristotelian doctrine is more obviously applicable. This is not 
disparaging the brilliant practice of Ibsen, for example, in a 
play like Hedda; it is not even objecting to the French classi- 
cists ; it is simply taking into account the fact that the unities 
of time and place may be transgressed without damage in plays 
like Lear or Hamlet, and that therefore the unities are not stand- 
ards but merely the names for particular devices of technique, 
producing effects especially pleasing to certain sorts of minds 
or to certain generations of men interested in neatness, for in- 
stance, or preciseness, or condensation, or finish, or one of any 
number of other similar or related qualities. 

The qualitative meaning of Arnold's phrase is clear enough. 
And it is surely as applicable to moral character as to literature. 



THE THEOBY OF LITEBABY CBITICISM 283 

to the religious attitude as to the artistic, to life as to books. 
Moreover, when the phrase comes to be defined more explicity, 
it will furnish a standard only for certain types of mind. It is 
not the word for Shakespeare's humor, nor for Keats' beauty 
of word and phrase and line and stanza; and it does not well 
characterize the Jmirnal to Stella or Vanity Fair. If on the 
other hand it be interpreted to cover all these cases, it loses 
most of its individuality and its special connotation and becomes 
merely a faintly colored, fading synonym for the excellent. 
Literary excellence is indeed a standard, the standard, but what 
our judicial critics seem to be demanding is specially defined and 
formulated postulates. 

As to probability, the term can be made to mean anything 
from accordance with necessary truth to poetic justice or char- 
acter motivation. It is more to be admired as an inclusive sug- 
gestion for many sorts of excellence than as a clearly defined 
standard of either form or quality, and yet it can be made to 
serve as naming requirements of either or both sorts. To be 
probable, characters will have to be more or less like the indi- 
vidual doing the judging ; and the incidents in a fiction, in order 
to be considered probable, will have to accord with the indi- 
vidual's experience of what "probably" happens, namely, of 
what he is capable of grasping as resembling the course of his 
own actual or imaginatively possible experience. In so far, on 
the other hand, as probability is accordance with logical require- 
ments common to all rational creatures, it names not a literary 
standard but the character of all of the experience that is open 
to rational minds. 

It would no doubt be interesting to carry out this application 
of a general theory of value in a particular region of experience 
in greater detail and with more references and examples, but 
it would after all add nothing to my thesis but illustrative con- 
tent, which I am not here concerned to supply. Moreover, such 
an investigation would be apt to become an adventure in literary 



284 A STUD¥ IN TEE TEEOEY OF VALUE 

criticism itself, and would therefore not be altogether to the 
purpose in what attempts to be a scientific discussion of prin- 
ciples. "What I seem to myself to have done in this brief con- 
cluding chapter is to give four specific examples of the way in 
which the theory of value expounded in the previous chapters 
throws light on the principles of literary criticism, and in par- 
ticular upon the question of standards. It has been in large 
part no doubt what the critics themselves have said, but it is 
not so much the actual results as to principles of criticism that 
I am interested in giving, as it is the way in which these results 
are to be derived directly from a rational theory of value in 
general. 

On the basis of such a general theory of value the chapter 
has shown, it seems to me, that all literary values are esthetic ; 
and thus it does away with much unnecessary disparagement of 
the esthetic itself. For it shows that all other than esthetic 
valuations are valuings of means instead of ends. It also clearly 
implies that literary values, in so far as they are estimated or 
measured, are subject to the same procedure as that followed 
in estimating the values of any of the ordinary goods of the 
market or of life in general. It shows secondly the error con- 
nected with the phrase pure literature, as this phrase is com- 
monly used by critics even of established reputation of the 
present day. Thirdly, in the case of the quarrel of the judicial 
critics with the impressionists, it indicates how altogether indis- 
pensable impressionism is, in so far as impressionism means 
having and rendering impressions; but it also shows that the 
judicial critics are contending in part at least for a characteristic 
which is necessary to the validity of rational discourse as such. 
Finally it indicates that the standards so much desiderated by 
the judicial critics are either nothing but the names for desired 
particular qualities on the one hand, of which there are as many 
as there are particular human likings, or else names for the 
logical requirements of all rational discourse. 



TEE IREOMY OF LITEBABY CBITICISM 285 

The conclusion to my own mind is that criticism depends for 
its fullness and value upon the capacity and sensibility of the 
critic's mind, for its validity upon his normality and his logical 
acumen, and for its importance upon his importance, upon his 
adequacy, that is, to speak for human beings. Obviously, also, 
the critic must needs have the ability to express himself ; and 
unless he be sophisticated and highly trained in all the details 
of literary art, he will not be adequate either to the task of 
reacting fully to the work at his hand in all its parts and aspects, 
or to the expressing of that reaction in language. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY* 

Aliotta, a. 

The Idealistic Eeaetion against Science. London, 1914. 
Andeeson, B. M. 

Social Value. Boston and New York, 1911. 

The Value of Money. New York, 1917. 

Baldwin, J. M. 

Genetic Theory of Eeality. New York, 1915. 
Thought and Things. New York, 1906-1911. 

BOSANQUET, B. 

The Philosophical Theory of the State. London, 1899. 
A History of Aesthetic. London, 1892. 
The Principle of Individuality and Value. London, 1912. 
The Value and Destiny of the Individual. London, 1913. 
Three Lectures on Aesthetic. London, 1915. 

Brentano, F. 

Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis. Leipzig, 1889. 

Brown, H. C. 

Value and Potentiality. ■ Jour. Phil., Psych., ^c, vol. 11 (1914), pp. 
29-37. 

Bush, W. T. 

Value and Causality. Ibid., vol. 15 (1918), pp. 85-96. 

COE, G. A. 

Religious Value. Ibid., vol. 5 (1908), pp. 253-256. 

Cohen, M. R. 

History versus Value. Ibid., vol. 11 (1914), pp. 701-716. 

Croce, B. 

Aesthetic. London, 1909. 

Dashiell, J. F. 

An Introductory Bibliography in Value. Jour. Phil., Psych., ^c, vol. 

10 (1913), pp. 472-476. 
The Philosophical Status of Values. New York, 1913. 
Values and Experience. Jour. Phil., Psch., ^c, vol. 11 (1914), pp. 491- 
497. 



* This list includes only books and articles dealing more or less directly 
with technical aspects of the theory of value. No attempt has been made 
to list the reading upon which the last chapter is based. 



BIBLIOGBAPHY 287 

Dewey, J. 

The Logic of Judgments of Practice. Jour. PJiil., PsycJi., ^c, vol. 12 
(1915), pp. 505-523, 533-543. 

Studies in Logical Theory. Chicago, 1903. 

Essays in Experimental Logic. Chicago, 1916. 

The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy. New York, 1910. 

The Objects of Valuation. Jour. Phil., Psych., 4rc., vol. 15 (1918), pp. 
253-258. 
Devtet, J., et al. 

Creative Intelligence. New York, 1917. 
Ehrenfels, C. von 

System der Werttheorie. Leipzig, 1897. 
Eisler, E. 

Studien zur Werttheorie. Leipzig, 1902. 
Everett, W. G. 

Moral Values. New York, 1918. 
Fisher, D. W. 

The Problem of the Value-Judgment. Phil. Eev., vol. 22 (1913), pp. 
623-638. 

Professor Urban 's Value-Theory. Jour. Phil., Psych., <^c., vol. 14 (1917), 
pp. 570-582. 
HiRN, Yrjo 

The Origins of Art. London, 1900. 

HOPFDING, H. 

The Philosophy of Eeligion. London, 1906. 
HowisoN, G. H. 

The Limits of Evolution; ed. 2. New York, 1904. 
Kallen, H. M. 

Dr. Montague and the Pragmatic Notion of Value. Jour. Phil., Psych., 

4-c., vol. 6 (1909), pp. 549-552. 
Value and Existence in Art and in Eeligion. Ibid., vol. 11 (1914), 
pp. 264-276. 
Kreibig, J. C. 

Psychologische Grundlegung eines Systems der Wert-Theorie. Wien, 
1902. 
Kruger, F. 

Begriff des Absolut Wertvollen als Grundlegung der Moralphilosophie. 
Leipzig, 1898. 

McDOTJGALL, W. 

An Introduction to Social Psychology; ed. 11. Boston, 1914. 
Psychology. 1912. 
Mackenzie, J. S. 

Notes on the Theory of Value. Mind, n. s., vol. 4 (1895), pp. 425-449. 



288 A STUDY IN TEE THEOBY OF VALUE 

Meinong, a. 

Psychologiseli-Etliische Untersuchungen zur Werth-Theorie. Graz, 1894. 

Ueber Annahmen; ed. 2. Leipzig, 1910. 

Ueber Werthaltung und Wert. ArcMv fiir systematische PMlosopMe, 

vol. 1 (1895), pp. 327-346. 
Fiir die Psychologie und gegen den Psyehologismus in der allgemeinen 

Werttlieorie. Logos, vol. 3 (1912), pp. 1-14. 

Montague, W. P. 

The True, the Good, and the Beautiful from a Pragmatic Standpoint. 
Jour. PUl., Psych., Src, vol. 6 (1909), pp. 233-238. 

Moore, A. G. 

Truth Value. Jour. Phil, Psych., ^c, vol. 5 (1908), pp. 429-436. 

Moore, G. E. 

Principia Ethica. New York, 1903. 
Ethics. New York, 1912. 

Moore, J. S. 

Value in its Relation to Meaning and Purpose. Jour. Phil., Psych., ^c, 

vol. 11 (1914), pp. 184-186. 
The System of Transcendental Values. Ihid., vol. 11 (1914), pp. 244- 

248. 
Montague's Classification of Values. Ihid., vol. 11 (1914), pp. 352-355. 
The System of Values. Ihid., vol. 7 (1910), pp. 282-291. 

MUNSTERBURG, H. 

The Eternal Values. Boston, 1909. 

Palmer, G. H. 

The Nature of Goodness. Boston, 1903. 

Perry, E. B. 

The Definition of Value. Jour. Phil., Psych., 4~c., vol. 11 (1914), pp. 

141-162. 
The Moral Economy. New York, 1909. 
A Realistic Theory of Independence in The New Realism (New York, 

1912), pp. 99-151. 
Present Philosophical Tendencies. New York, 1912. 
Dewey and Urban on Value-Judgments. Jour. Phil., Psych., ^c, vol. 

14 (1917), pp. 169-181. 
Economic Value and Moral Value. Quar. Jour, of Economics, vol. 30 

(1916), pp. 443-485. 

RiBOT, Th. 

Essai sur les passions; ed. 2. Paris, 1907. 
La logique des sentiments. Paris, 1905. 

RiCKEET, H. 

Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis. Freiburg, 1892. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 289 

EUSSELL, B. 

The Problems of Philosophy. New York, 1912. 

Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method 
in Philosophy. Chicago, 1914. 

Santayanna, G. 

The Sense of Beauty. New York, 1896. 
The Life of Eeason. New York, 1905-1906. 

Schneider, H. W. 

The Values of Pragmatic Theory: Ee joinder to Professor Urban. Jour. 

Phil, Psych., #c., vol. 14 (1917), pp. 706-714. 
The Theory of Values. Ibid., vol. 14 (1917), pp. 141-154. 

Second, J. 

Le concept de valeurs d'apres deux ouvrages recents. Eevue phil., 

vol. 64 (1907), pp. 546-554. 
La philosophic des valeurs. Ibid., vol. 66 (1908), pp. 477-495. 

Shand, a. F. 

Character and the Emotions. Miyid, n. s., vol. 5 (1896), pp. 203-226. 
Foundations of Character. New York, 1914. 

Sheldon, W. H. 

An Empirical Definition of Value. Jour. Phil., Psych., ^c, vol. 11 
(1914), pp. 113-124. 

SiMMEL, G. 

Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. Berlin, 1892. 
Philosophie des Geldes; ed. 2. Leipzig, 1907. 

Smart, W. 

An Introduction to the Theory of Value; ed. 3. London, 1914. 

Stout, G. F. 

Analytic Psychology. London, 1896. 

The Groundwork of Psychology. New York, 1903. 

Strange, E. H. 

The Nature of Judgment. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n. s., 
vol. 16 (1915-1916), pp. 326-343. 

Stuart, H. W. 

Valuation as a Logical Process in Studies in Logical Theory by John 
Dewey et al. (Chicago, 1903), pp. 227-340. 

Urban, W. M. 

Value and Existence. Jonr. Phil, Psych., ^c, vol. 13 (1916), pp. 449- 

465. 
Knowledge of Value and the Value-Judgments. Ibid., vol. 13 (1916), 

pp. 673-687. 
The Pragmatic Theory of Value: A Eeply to Herbert W. Schneider. 

Ibid,, vol. 14 (1917), pp. 701-706. 



«« 



290 A STUDY IN THE TEEOBY OF VALUE 

Ontological Problems of Value. Ibid., vol. 14 (1917), pp. 309-327. 
Again, the Value Objective and the Value- Judgment: Reply to Pro- 
fessor Perry and Dr. Fisher. Ibid., vol. 15 (1918), pp. 393-405. 
Worth (Article in- Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology). 
Valuation: Its Nature and Laws. London, 1909. 

Whittaker, T. 

The Theory of Abstract Ethics. Cambridge, 1916. 

WjNDELBAND, W. 

Einleitung in die Philosophie. Tiibingen, 1914. 
Praludien; ed. 5. Tiibingen, 1915. 

WOODBRIDGE, P. J. E. 

The Problem of Consciousness in Studies, &c., by Former Students of 
C. E. Carman (Boston and New York, 1906), pp. 137-166. 



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